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Content AdvisoryThis episode includes an extended discussion of a televised paranormal investigation in which a crew treated an alleged spirit-box recording about a sexual assault as cause for celebration. The hosts address the claim and the ethics of its presentation directly. Please consider another episode if this topic would be traumatic for you.

Blake and Karen are joined by paranormal investigator Matt Baxter for a live MonsterTalk recording about Denver’s Peabody-Whitehead Mansion – the red sandstone pile on Capitol Hill’s old Millionaire Row that ghost tour operators like to call the most haunted building in Colorado, if not the country. The three of them had walked the place the night before at the invitation of author and paranormal researcher Richard Estep, who is writing a book about the mansion and wanted skeptical voices in it alongside the believer accounts he had already collected.

What they found was a genuinely beautiful 1889 Frank Edbrooke house with a well-documented history – a Crimean War surgeon, a strikebreaking governor, a second life as restaurants, nightclubs, and recently as apartments. But what does it mean if the haunting reputation does not show up anywhere in the record until the restaurant era of the 1950s? From there the episode turns to the 2012 Ghost Adventures visit, the spirit box sessions it produced, and the moment that earns this episode a content warning.

In This Episode The real history of 1128 Grant Street – built in 1889 for Dr. William Riddick Whitehead, a surgeon who served in both the Crimean War and the American Civil War, and later home to Colorado Governor James Hamilton Peabody
Architect Frank E. Edbrooke (Wikipedia), who also gave Denver The Brown Palace Hotel (Wikipedia), the Oxford Hotel and the state capitol
Governor James Hamilton Peabody (Wikipedia), The Colorado Labor Wars and the Cripple Creek strike (Wikipedia), and how a genuinely brutal labor record gets recycled as a ghost motif
Why the ghost stories start in the 1950s – when the house became a restaurant and bar – and not during the sixty years people actually lived in it
The “Peabody Dozen”: soldier spirits, a young woman on the second floor, a phantom chandelier, a Lady in Black, a crotchety old man, crying babies, and the usual poltergeist furniture
What the current residents report experiencing: nothing
The 2005 Peter Boyles Halloween radio broadcast from the mansion, and Matt’s front-row seat to a spirit box being sold as “Thomas Edison’s Telephone to the Dead”
Ghost hunters teaching paying customers how to cup their hands near a camera flash to manufacture orb photographs
A brand new ghost story introduced in 2005 that simply failed to take hold – folklore caught in the act of being made
A close reading of the 2012 Ghost Adventures episode: the spirit box sessions, the “unsuspecting workers” experiment, the ball of light, the prop skull, and the on-screen claim that police opened an investigation
Auditory pareidolia, apophenia, priming, and why the on-screen subtitle is doing most of the work
Whether odd rooms, steep staircases, infrasound and EMF actually contribute to unease – or whether the stories we are told beforehand are doing the real work

Episode LinksPeabody-Whitehead Mansion (Wikipedia)
The Peabody Mansion – official site
Westword: “Haunted” Denver Mansion Turned Into Luxury Apartments (2026)
Alan Berg (Wikipedia)
Ghost Adventures (Wikipedia)
Electronic voice phenomenon (Wikipedia)
Pareidolia (Wikipedia)
Apophenia (Wikipedia)
Infrasound (Wikipedia)
Prof. Chris French, anomalistic psychology (Wikipedia)
Denver Public Library, Western History Collection
Colorado State Archives

Our GuestMatt Baxter is a paranormal investigator and a longtime friend of the show. He was present at the mansion during the 2005 Halloween radio broadcast and returned with Blake and Karen for this visit.

Thanked but not appearing – Richard Estep, who arranged the visit, is a paramedic and paranormal investigator who has written more than thirty books and appeared on Haunted Hospitals, Paranormal 911 and Haunted Case Files. His book on the mansion is in progress, and he has an open invitation to come on the show when it is finished.

Suggested ReadingDenver history and Capitol Hill
Denver Landmarks & Historic Districts by Tom Noel and Wellington Webb
Colorado’s War on Militant Unionism: James H. Peabody and the Western Federation of Miners – George G. Suggs Jr.
Ghosts of Denver’s Capitol Hill – Phil Goodstein (out of print – look for Library copy)
Talked to Death: The Life and Murder of Alan Berg – Stephen Singular

Hauntings, folklore and belief
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark – Carl Sagan
Paranormal America – Christopher Bader, F. Carson Mencken and Joseph Baker

PromotionsBeyond Words by Karen Stollznow is out now

Richard Estep’s book on the Peabody-Whitehead Mansion is forthcoming. We will link it here when it is out.

CreditsMonsterTalk theme music is by Peach Stealing Monkeys.
MonsterTalk is produced by Blake Smith and co-hosted by Karen Stollznow. If you enjoy the show, you can support it directly at patreon.com/monstertalk. Thank you – sincerely – to everyone who does.

SEO TranscriptThis is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

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The post 🏚️ S05E43 – The Peabody-Whitehead Mansion appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Blake and Karen are joined by Dr. Ben Dodds, author of Myths and Memories of the Black Death to discover more about a disease which forever changed world history when it swept across Europe in the 1300s.

The conversation runs from the mechanics of the disease – what a bubo actually is, what finally kills you, and why the textbook rats-and-fleas model spreads far too slowly to explain what medieval eyewitnesses described – to the harder question of how anyone in 2026 knows any of it. Along the way: the marmot hypothesis, the medieval physicians who were certain they had it figured out, the appalling 1348 pogroms whose victims were dug out of the ground in a Catalan town a short drive from where Dodds was sitting, why Monty Python understood the Middle Ages better than most historical novelists, and a closing answer about the aftermath that most listeners will not see coming. Blake’s cold open, meanwhile, sets out to explain why we call it the Black Death at all – and reels in an unexpected monster.

The Guest’s BookMyths and Memories of the Black Deathby Ben Dodds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
Publisher’s page at SpringerLink– includes chapter previews
Dr. Ben Dodds at Florida State University– his faculty page, including his ongoing work on Spanish bandit stories

The Disease ItselfThe Black Death– the 1346-1353 outbreak specifically, as distinct from every later plague wave
Yersinia pestis– the bacterium, not a virus, which turns out to matter a great deal
Bubonic plagueand thebuboesit is named for
Septicemic plagueandpneumonic plague– the faster and the more transmissible forms
Disseminated intravascular coagulation– one of the mechanisms behind the darkened skin, and a good illustration of how thoroughly this disease overwhelms the body’s own defenses
The Oriental rat flea– the classic vector, and the reason the classic model spreads too slowly
Marmots– not Marmite, not Vegemite. Long-standing plague reservoirs across Central Asia
CDC: Plagueand theWHO plague fact sheet– the disease is treatable with antibiotics and still very much with us
National Museum of Australia: Bubonic plague– background on the Australian outbreaks and the North Head Quarantine Station Karen visited

How We Know: The Science Is Not SettledThe ancient DNA work that finally confirmedY. pestisas the culprit also opened a new argument about whether the Black Death left a mark on the human immune system. It is a live dispute, and a good example of exactly the point Blake raises in the episode about provisional truths.

Klunk et al., “Evolution of immune genes is associated with the Black Death”(Nature, 2022) – the East Smithfield plague-pit study identifyingERAP2as a candidate for selection
Barton et al., “Insufficient evidence for natural selection associated with the Black Death”– the rebuttal, arguing the statistical signal does not hold up
John Hawks: Another look at selection and the Black Death– a readable walk through both sides of the argument

Ordinary People, Ordinary RecordsDr. Alex Brown, Durham University– principal investigator on the Leverhulme-funded project “Modelling the Black Death and Social Connectivity in Medieval England”
What a list of Black Death survivors reveals about how people recovered– Brown and Grace Owen on a scrap of parchment tucked into a Ramsey Abbey manor account, naming 22 tenants who took to their sickbeds and got back up again
Medieval peasants and their surprisingly generous sick leave– the Black Death as a sickness event and not only a mortality event
The Great Famine of 1315-1317– the childhood deprivation that may have made a generation of adults more vulnerable thirty years later
The Little Ice Age– climate shift, animal behavior, and new contact between species
The Statute of Labourers (1351)– what it looks like when the landowning classes are extremely annoyed that wages have gone up

What Medieval Science Actually ThoughtHumorism– the framework inside which the whole medieval debate took place, and the reason “complexion” meant something quite different then
Miasma theory– bad air rising from the earth, one of the competing explanations
Medical astrology– planetary conjunctions as a cause of humoral imbalance, and a serious subject of university debate
The flagellants– extreme public penance, which looks like panic from here and looked like a reasonable intervention from there
The Plague of Justinian(6th century) and theThird Plague Pandemic(late 19th century onward) – the other two documented global plague pandemics

Blame, Scapegoats, and TàrregaPersecution of Jews during the Black Death– the pogroms of 1348-1351 across Europe
The well-poisoning accusation– a conspiracy theory that medieval observers could see was contradicted by the evidence in front of them
The blood libel– first recorded in the 1140s and still circulating today
“The Black Death and its Consequences for the Jewish Community in Tàrrega”– Colet, Muntané, Ruiz, Saula and Subirà inThe Medieval Globe, on the 2007 excavation of six mass graves at the Roquetes necropolis and how the bones line up with the documents
“Uncovering a Medieval Pogrom: Genetic History of a Jewish Community in Catalonia”(Genes, 2026) – brand new genome-wide analysis of sixteen individuals from those graves, the first such data from a medieval Iberian Jewish community

The Black Death in Pop CultureDoomsday Bookby Connie Willis (1992) – the Oxford time-travel novel Dodds recommends, and rates highly for the accuracy and the emotional weight of its 1348 sections
Monty Python and the Holy Grail(1975) – the “bring out your dead” sketch, which Dodds argues is not mocking medieval people but mocking our condescension toward them
World Without Endby Ken Follett – discussed in the episode as the guest’s single least favorite depiction of the Black Death, so consider yourself warned rather than recommended
The Pillars of the Earth– the earlier Follett novel it follows [AFFILIATE LINK NEEDED IF WANTED]

Bonus Monster: The Signature QuestionThe Green Children of Woolpit– Dr. Dodds’ favorite monster. Two children with green-tinged skin appear in a Suffolk village, recorded by two chroniclers well after the fact
William of NewburghandRalph of Coggeshall– the two sources for the story
Every prosaic explanation offered is plausible and none of them are well grounded in the evidence, which is exactly why the story has legs. By the early modern period people were already suggesting the children had fallen from the moon.

About That Cold OpenOxford English Dictionary: “Black Death”– where the earliest English attestation lives, and where the argument starts. Nobody who lived through the pandemic called it that.

PromotionsKaren’s bookBeyond Words: What Animals Say and How We Understand Them

CreditsMonsterTalk theme music by Peach Stealing Monkeys.

SEO TranscriptThis is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

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It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24 mile long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland.
It’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
Hey, we’re calling this episode The Black Death.
But before we dive in, I want to give you something to chat about at your cocktail party.
I mean, your next cocktail party.
Because that’s what this show is really about, right?
To give you weird stuff to say at fancy cocktail parties?
Wink emoji.
Right.
So, no one who lived through the Black Death called it that.
In the 1300s, it would have been called the Pestilence, the Great Mortality, or perhaps the Great Death.
As we will learn in the following interview, this is not a disease lost to history.
It’s alive and well, unlike the people who are unfortunate enough to catch it.
Now, don’t be too afraid.
Modern mortality rates are far lower for a variety of reasons, but it’s still a very serious illness.
Black Death first shows up in print 200 years after that first big outbreak.
It’s Svartadoden in Swedish chronicles in the 1500s, and in Danish it appears as Densortadoth around 1600.
But why was it called the Black Death?
This is the little mystery I got hooked on when writing this intro, and I’m so glad I checked because I found a really cool monster hiding in the etymology.
All right.
Historians of the plague lean towards this being a kind of translation error.
The Latin atra mors uses atra, which means both black and dreadful or terrible.
And the idea here is that the metaphorical terrible death got flattened into its quite literal colorful meaning.
Meanwhile…
controversy looms for the etymology crowd, because if you check the Oxford English Dictionary, as one does, you’ll find the OED asserts the terminology comes from the victim’s skin turning black.
Modern medicine tells us that the dark coloring of the skin can be caused either by necrotic flesh or from what is called disseminated intravascular coagulation.
Check the show notes if you want to learn more about how this disease absolutely overwhelms a human’s defenses.
Now, I’m slowly working my way through an online course on the colorful life of words.
And dictionaries may seem like cozy repositories for interesting snapshots of a word’s meaning.
But let me tell you, folks, dictionaries are battlegrounds.
Don’t let the pince-nez glasses and the tweed blazers fool you.
Anyway, I’m inclined to believe the translation hypothesis, the one that vectors from Latin metaphorically to English literally.
But while researching this introduction, this is where I got a really cool surprise.
Now, the earliest use of the English phrase black death that the OED can find anywhere is from 1755.
It sits on page 24 of an English translation by a man named Berthelsen.
He was translating a Danish bishop’s book, rendering the Danish phrase Sortaduth into Black Death for what is currently the oldest such usage in print.
The bishop who wrote this book is named Erik Pontapaden.
The book is The Natural History of Norway.
You have heard from this book before, even if you don’t remember it.
Trust me on this, because The Natural History of Norway turns out to be one of the founding documents of modern kraken lore.
In the book, Pontapadan argues for the sea serpent, the mermaid, and an octopus of monstrous size with a reputation for pulling ships under.
A century later, Herman Melville wrote a pretty famous book about a whaling crew whose captain gets somewhat obsessed with finding a very particular whale.
In fact, a whale who might be characterized as the White Death.
In chapter 59 of Moby Dick, the Pequod finds what Melville describes as
A vast pulpy mass furlongs in length and breadth of a glancing cream-collar lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its center and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas.
After it sinks back into the sea, our narrator Ishmael comments, There seems to be some ground to imagine that the great kraken of Bishop Pontapadan may ultimately resolve itself into squid.
So how about that?
The term that modern English speakers use to describe the Great Plague, the Black Death, and the first print assertion associating the legendary Kraken with a real but mysterious enormous cephalopod species come from the same book.
Now, to be pedantic, it’s Pontapadan’s text as translated to English by Berthelsen.
I don’t want to leave that out or someone might, well, actually, use so hard that at your cocktail party you have to go hide behind the charcuterie board in embarrassment.
And I don’t have to tell you how these fancy cocktail parties can go, right?
Also, Herman Melville was writing from his personal experience on a whaling ship.
And at almost the exact same time, Iapetus Stamestrup was writing up the Kraken in scientific papers and would later name these tentacular giants Architeuthis, just six years later.
All right, you go on, mingle, have some hors d’oeuvres.
I’ve got to go join Karen and our guest, Dr. Benjamin Dodds, for some Monster Talk.
We’re bringing on Dr. Benjamin Dodds, Ben, to talk about the Black Death.
And it’s one of those topics that I’ve been interested in for a very long time, since my university days.
And it just feels like everybody knows the stories, but then the more you dig into it, the more complicated and surprising it all becomes too.
And I think it’s fascinating that we’re still learning new things about the pandemic and how people experienced it and drawing parallels to COVID and things that happened to us today.
So I thought that Ben would be…
the ideal guest to come on and help us unpack the history and also some of the myths.
Yeah, there might be some misconceptions out there.
Yeah, just a few.
So welcome to the show, Ben.
Indeed.
So I understand that your work is on cultural memory and you research the Black Death and Spanish history too and interweaving with cultural memory, how we remember and how we misremember in popular culture.
So this is right up our alley and that of our listeners.
Could you tell us just a little bit about your work and what you do?
Yeah, I really first started working on the Black Death when I was working on peasant agriculture and peasant economy in England.
So it was using medieval sources rather than modern sources and memory.
And I was looking at the way in which peasant societies managed to turn themselves around and come back from the impact of the Black Death, from the very high mortality and, you know, what effect it had on their economic life.
And then later on, I became interested in the cultural memory aspects.
That was largely because I was very fortunate to teach classes on the Black Death for many years and work with lots of students on this.
And the students were often interested in, you know, the movies and the novels and so on that emerged from the or that represented the Black Death.
So I tried to, you know, try to have a little think about that and look at the Black Death from that different modern perspective.
So you’re using the past to learn about the peasant tents.
That’s right.
Yeah, I’ve never thought of it like that, but that is true.
I always make the assumption that people do know about the Black Death.
I mean, it’s such a… What is the word?
Synecdoche.
Like, it really sort of wraps up a whole lot in a tiny set of words.
But what is the Black Death?
How long of a period are we talking about?
You know, how long did it take to sweep Europe and…
You know, basically, what are the basics?
And from there, we’ll dive in a little deeper.
I mean, the Black Death is a major pandemic that arrives in Europe in 1347, spreads across Europe into the early 1350s, also affected parts of Africa and affected very large parts of Asia, probably going back significantly earlier, perhaps even into the 13th century, some scholars have thought recently.
That’s the sort of Asian part of the pandemic that it moves gradually westwards into Western Europe.
So it lasted a few months in each individual place that it went to visiting this sort of awful mortality on pretty much every community that we know about.
Our evidence is mostly from Europe, although people are working much more on evidence from Asia nowadays.
So that’s an exciting aspect of the work that’s being done.
And it’s an outbreak of bubonic plague, which is caused by a bacteria called Yersinia pestis.
And the Black Death is often used as a sort of coverall term to describe all plague outbreaks in the past.
But strictly speaking, the Black Death is the one in the 1340s, which are very important because the Black Death comes to Europe in the 1340s after being absent for several centuries and then keeps coming back again repeatedly every few years.
That is to say, outbreaks of high mortality plague.
based mortality right through into the 17th and 18th centuries in European countries at least.
So it’s the beginning of this long phase of high disease related mortality.
You’ve reminded me that years ago I grew up in Australia and I went to a place in the northern beaches.
It’s called the quarantine station.
So it was a place where they would people who would come in on boats would have to stay there for a period of 40 days if they had scarlet fever or some kind of interest, some kind of.
infection or disease just to kind of contain it, not bring it into the general population.
And they had these kind of log books there showing the people who’d come through and what kinds of illnesses they had.
And I was astonished to see cases of the Black Death then.
And so that was back in the 1800s in Australia.
And I’ve heard that there are still some cases around today.
Is that true?
Yeah, you get it’s usually framed in terms of three major global pandemics that we know about in documented history.
So one in the sixth century that’s sometimes called Justinian’s Plague.
Then the 14th century one, which is obviously the Black Death that, you know, continued renewed outbreaks after that.
And then there’s a third pandemic as well that emerges in the Far East in the late 19th century.
And then.
That’s the one that has a really devastating outbreak, especially in the Indian subcontinent, with millions of people dying then into the early years of the 20th century.
But as you as you say, Karen, I know absolutely that you get isolated cases of bubonic plague today when people have been in contact with infected animals in the southern and western United States, for example, in the mountains and, you know, in other parts of the world to Central Asia and so on.
Very shocking.
And I’d like to ask about how many people it actually affected too, because when I was at university, we learnt that it could have been anything from maybe a third to a half of the population of Europe that died from the bubonic plague.
And now I’m hearing that the statistic is more maybe around 60%.
Can you clarify?
what the accepted figure is today?
Yeah, I think that’s right.
Something like, if we take their sort of population of Europe as a whole, something like 50%, maybe even higher.
It’s difficult to get precise data on the mortality because we do know about some individual communities, monasteries, for example, or groups of, there’s groups of notaries in one city that we know about, but they tend to be adult males.
And some people have suggested that children and elderly folk might have been even more vulnerable than they are.
So, you know, sort of push up the figures that we’ve got from the known communities a little bit more.
But something around 50 percent in total, although there’s a lot of evidence of how much the.
the impact varied from one community to the next.
So there’s a really fantastic study of North East England and lots of small isolated villages which were quite close to each other.
Some of those villages experienced the death of 80% of their tenants, some 20% of their tenants, even if they’re just a few miles apart.
So a lot of local variation.
But yeah, really, really high overall mortality.
That’s pretty difficult to imagine, you know, given what we went through with the sort of fear and awfulness of COVID and the mortality rate there was much, much lower, obviously.
So it’s difficult to really, I don’t know, compute that kind of death on that sort of scale.
I think the only comparable and possibly even worse case of disease-related mortality was in…
indigenous communities in the Americas, and some of them, at least after their first contact with Europeans, where people’s immune systems weren’t used to the diseases that the Europeans were bringing with them.
So we see sort of awful 90% mortality of, you know, people there, and huge overall mortality over
in the Americas as a result of that contact with the Europeans.
So, you know, I think those are two comparable events within recorded history.
I think in prehistory there may well have been ones too that archaeologists are sort of turning up with this devastating high mortality.
Yeah.
People know this as words, but…
There’s a very visceral side to this besides stacks of corpses.
There’s the whole symptoms of the disease itself.
And I remember even from high school, you know, and, you know, in American high school, this is a very small segment of a history class.
Right.
But.
The descriptions of what happens to you if you get this are pretty astonishing.
And the buboes, you know, I guess I suppose that means your body is dealing with so much infection.
It just blows out your armpits and swells.
But lymph glands are just like you’re just overwhelmed with infection.
But what is it?
that kills people?
Do we know?
I mean, like the disease sticks around for a long time.
And I know we get some level of immunity in the surviving generations, but this disease is astonishingly brutal during these high mortality times.
Can you talk, I’d like to two things.
What are the symptoms?
I guess really three things.
What kills you?
And then I’m really curious as to how do we know?
Like, what are the historical vectors and archaeological vectors?
Like, how do we know what happened?
These are really hard questions, these, and really difficult to get at.
But in terms of symptoms, I think that’s right, that the body is overwhelmed by bacterial infection, hence the buboes in some cases.
You get blackening of the skin too, sort of blotches appearing on people’s skin.
Often this culminates in a sort of really severe chest infection, so people are coughing up blood and so on.
You run an extremely high fever.
You die very quickly, often within two or three days, in some cases within weeks.
24 hours if the um if the the bacteria enter the bloodstream very quickly then you know septicemic version of a plague you can die you know die even more quickly than that so people are dying um you know very rapidly in a very visible horrible way that involves a lot of a lot of pain and suffering um i think that the question of immunity is a really intriguing one because
normally people don’t really have immunity to bacterial infections.
You might have a portion of the population that’s immune to particular viruses, but Black Death is bacteria.
Good point.
And yet it does seem that when we get detailed evidence on particular populations, it does seem to suggest that those who survived the Black Death were more likely to survive subsequent outbreaks of plague in the 1360s and 1370s and so on.
And so you get this odd skewing of the population pyramid by the late 14th century because
And generations of children are taken out, well, not entirely taken out, but severely sort of depleted by these repeated outbreaks of plague that affects them more than the adults, because they were the ones who hadn’t survived a previous outbreak.
So you get a sort of ageing population pyramid.
in the places that we know a lot about.
So it’s a kind of curious situation, something we don’t fully understand.
We know about the nature of the infection, but only because of recent work.
There was a really long standing debate on whether the Black Death was caused by
plague at all whether it was caused by Yersinia pestis at all and whether it could have been something different which has been in large part resolved just in recent years because scientists have been able to do much more with ancient DNA found in the burials of plague victims and they’ve been able to identify the DNA of the bacteria that were in their bloodstreams demonstrating that you know that was pretty much likely to have been the cause of the bubonic plague so it’s a major sort of advance and discovery.
um but then that throws up another problem which is when you have modern bubonic plague outbreaks they spread slowly and they’re quite difficult to catch because it’s a it’s a rat-based disease that needs to be transmitted from the rats to the humans by rat fleas so all the rats die because they’re suffering from the disease the fleas have nothing to feed from so they’re then forced to feed from humans therefore passing the disease to the humans quite a slow sort of process
Whereas medieval people are very clear that whatever the Black Death was or the form of plague or whatever can be passed from person to person in a really sort of rapid way, you know, much in the same way as, you know, we know that COVID could be passed from person to person.
So we’re not quite clear on what the mechanism for that was.
Droplet infection, possibly, but…
I mean, obviously, I’m not a doctor, but apparently the bacteria are quite large, so it’s difficult to catch plague from droplet infection.
It’s not sort of aerosolized in the same way as COVID is, for instance.
Some people think it could have been human body lice, which obviously people carry much more in the Middle Ages, and they carry disease like typhus and so on.
So maybe they were involved in plague infections.
Other mammals, besides rats as well, possibly, so the other carriers.
So there’s a lot of interesting scientific work on this and, you know, unresolved mysteries about…
quite why the Black Death is so devastating and spread so quickly.
Yes, speaking of culprits, I’ve heard that some people have been pointing the finger at marmots.
Is that true?
Yeah, you can get some quite plausible sort of scenarios where you have the early 14th century’s period of very rapid changing climate, where there’s cooling of the climate in the 14th century, which obviously affects the behaviour of animals and insects associated with those animals, because they sort of move if you’ve got changes in temperature, precipitation and so on.
So you could have a scenario where animals that aren’t coming into contact with humans very much,
start to come into contact with humans much more, transmitting diseases to humans.
But it’s one of those things that it’s easy to come up with sort of hypotheses about what might have happened, but really difficult to actually prove because we really need to know the history of marmots and rats and so on.
And it’s very difficult to unpick from the archaeological record because they’re very small bones and the people don’t necessarily look for them.
Obviously, documentary records are kind of problematic because it depends what people are noticing and what they choose to write down.
So, yeah, there are all sorts of really interesting cases or possible scenarios for the transmission of that disease from animals to humans in the first place.
And as a clarification point, this is marmites, not marmite and not Vegemite, right?
Absolutely.
They’re to blame for other things.
But I mean, to me, it’s fascinating that.
these questions are still there.
And of course they’re still with us now because.
even though the disease theory of medicine, I believe, is pretty widely accepted, there’s still people who resist it.
And that is present back then and has debate at an academic level.
And then now it has debate as sort of an epistemological level, which is very different.
But that resistance to the idea that…
disease comes from bacteria or virus is still out there.
And I just, I worry sometimes because I’m fascinated by these debates and these efforts to try to, you know, narrow down what is the actual cause.
But at the same time, the uncertainty inherent in science, where we’re always looking at provisional truths, is seen as a weakness by people who don’t want science at all and want to reject it.
I want these discussions.
I want these debates.
But at the same time, I am always afraid that having them is just fuel for the people who want to reject the entire system.
I agree.
And I think the Black Death is a really good case in point.
And, you know, I guess we might come to this in terms of sort of myths and memories and so on.
But the Black Death is the ultimate sort of medieval thing, isn’t it?
That this demonstrates how horrible the Middle Ages were, how dirty they were, how supposedly ignorant people were and so on.
And, you know, like the Monty Python, bring out your dead sketch and so on.
This representation of people in the past as hopelessly superstitious and helpless in the face of things like this.
And I think that…
That sort of image of people in the Middle Ages is really undermined by what you’re saying, Blake, because as you point out, we don’t really fully understand what was going on now from our perspective with all our supposed additional knowledge and so on.
And that raises the other question of the extent to which we would be able to cope with something like this now, because you can treat bubonic plague with strong antibiotics.
But if you had so many people becoming infected so quickly.
You know, it would be a whole big deal trying to get enough of those antibiotics produced and supplied to people.
You know, we know already from the vaccine situation during COVID-19 how difficult this sort of stuff is when you have something on a very large scale.
So I think that we’re probably not quite as safe from something like the Black Death as we might be inclined to think that we are.
But we have an understanding.
The Black Death has the advantage that if it takes a while to produce the medicine, the number of people who need it is drastically reduced very quickly.
And the same applies to people getting that medicine, right?
If you’re dying so quickly, it’s too late, right?
Isn’t it?
Before anything happens.
It is.
That’s very dark humor, but true.
Malthusian reckoning.
So Ben, how much do we know, actually know about how ordinary people experienced the plague?
And what are some of the biggest misconceptions that were around at that time?
I mean, I think we know quite a lot about how people experience the play because we’ve got a lot of written records from, you know, from Europe and other places, too.
So we’ve got eyewitness accounts.
We’ve got lots of, you know, really gruesome descriptions.
How far that translates to what ordinary people experience, though, is much more problematic because obviously most people can’t read and write in the Middle Ages and they’re not leaving firsthand accounts of what they experienced.
um that said we can get at their experience often from administrative records and that kind of thing which record um you know what happens in agricultural communities there’s some really interesting work being done by a historian called alex brown has a team of researchers at durham university at the moment where they uncovered
in records of payments to workers, people at the time of the Black Death who weren’t able to work as sort of medieval sick leave, which sort of reveals the Black Death not just as a mortality event, but also as a sickness event that people are just unwell and sort of taken out of action for a while.
So we can get this sort of roundabout picture from those records that they’re not very appealing on the surface, right?
Because they’re,
sort of administrative and it’s all about money and payments and this, that and the other.
But historians have been able to use those to give clues about ordinary people’s experience.
I think in terms of misconceptions, I think one of the main ones is that medieval people were so helpless in the face of the Black Death that they sort of panicked and behaved in irrational ways, threw up their arms and just sort of went crazy, basically, which I think is…
Really a long way from the truth, because I think people in the Middle Ages, first of all, thought that they understood what was going on, that there was a, you know, Blake, you were talking about this.
There was medical science in the Middle Ages and it wasn’t medical science as we think of it.
But they scientists thought that they were able to explain the Black Death and they debated it and had different possible explanations for it.
But they thought that they had the tools to understand what was happening.
Then obviously a lot of people saw the Black Death in terms of a kind of biblical punishment, you know, which made a lot of sense if you’d heard a lot of Bible stories and so on.
This was the sort of thing that God might do to punish sinful humans.
And so they’re able to make sense of the experience, possibly in a way that we wouldn’t really be able to today, that most people wouldn’t.
see frame things in those terms but to them this was entirely logical this is the sort of thing that god had to do in order to warn human beings to behave themselves better um so we see stuff like this extreme penitence you know that people whipping themselves and so on which looks to us like people going crazy in the face of the black death but is actually quite a rational response in terms of their understanding of what was going on to try and allay the you know the suffering that they were experiencing
So I think it obviously varies from person to person, group to group.
But a lot of medieval people responded in a pretty rational and sensible way to the awful situation they were facing.
They’re also pragmatic, too.
You know, the economy didn’t collapse.
People went out and sowed the fields and harvested the grain and so on because they had no choice.
If they didn’t do that, they were going to die of something else.
Right.
If the Black Death didn’t get them.
So you get this kind of continuity in the face of a disaster that’s pretty unimaginable to us.
If you’re into statistics, this seems like an incredible opportunity to hypothesize many, many effects and let them play out.
I mean, I’m thinking here, like, for example, just you’ve got fewer people able to go out and sow the fields.
But also, you’ve got fewer people who will need to eat in the autumn, right?
So it is fascinating if you could detach yourself from the horrible humanity of the thing, like all the death and the pain and the suffering.
But just from a how do these things play out in economic models, in population models?
Wow, what a rich ecosystem for testing ideas.
But you mentioned that it’s a bacteria, not a virus, which means, I think, as you were saying or alluding to, someone could get this again and again.
The immunity might be, I guess if there’s a genetic level, it would be people who might have a better immune system for recovering.
Maybe that’s the vector.
Who knows?
Or the angle, the advantage.
But golly, you could get this every season if it comes back.
No, thanks.
Yeah.
I think that’s right.
There’s some really good evidence for that from cemeteries, too, when people have looked at the bones of people who died in the Black Death because there was a huge famine in the 1310s.
And one of the arguments is that the impact of that famine on children was so severe that it permanently weakened them.
for the rest of their life so you know folk who are adults at the time of the Black Death had gone through this sort of traumatic deprivation of you know dietary deficiencies and so on in their childhood years and that made them much more vulnerable to the Black Death when it came along so without that it’s not that there wouldn’t have been a Black Death but that the effects of it were exacerbated by those long-standing deficiencies which I think that archaeologists can tell when they look at people’s
look at the evidence of bones because bone structure is changed by those kinds of deficiencies.
But then, as you say, you get the opposite scenario, right?
Because after the Black Death, there’s suddenly an abundance of land and far fewer people who are using that land to survive.
So you get this sort of ironic situation where people have gone through what must have been truly traumatic and yet find themselves in a much better position afterwards where they’re able to acquire land cheaply.
They’re able to work for people for much higher wages than they have been before.
And it’s almost overnight.
There’s a sudden improvement in the aftermath of the Black Death that must have been really noticeable.
I mean, all our source material comes from elites and they don’t like this, right?
Because they don’t want to have to pay workers more money.
They don’t think the poor should be going around behaving like the rich.
So they talk about…
You know, poor folk going around wearing coats that are lined with fur and drinking from, you know, nice sort of cups and going to the pub instead of working in the fields because wages were high.
So they had to work less and so on.
So that’s the elites getting cross about something which must have been great for most people.
The plague dividend, right?
Absolutely.
So, Ben, you mentioned the explanations and that some people viewed this as a punishment from God.
And even though there wasn’t medical science as we understand it today, what were some of the explanations that people came up with that medical people of the time thought might be underpinning this disease?
Well, they have no understanding in the Middle Ages, obviously, of microscopic pathogens in the human body that are causing disease.
And they frame disease instead in terms of the balance of humours in our body.
So each person’s body is made up of this set of humours.
And when you are ill, that’s because those different components, black bile, yellow bile and so on, are out of sync.
um so when medieval people talked about someone’s complexion that meant their overall balance of humors that defined their personality so you might be phlegmatic or choleric or sanguine which is defined by your natural balance of humors but then when someone’s someone gets some kind of disease that balance is thrown out
And that’s what causes the disease.
So there is no doubt that the Black Death is caused by some kind of humoral imbalance like every other disease.
But the debate between scientists is what causes the humoral imbalance.
And one of the you know, one of the main explanations is astrology.
So people are thinking about the movements of the planets across the backdrop of the stars in the sky and.
One of the things that determines people’s humours is the way in the arrangement of the planets as they sort of cross each other’s paths and so on, you know, within the signs of the zodiac and all the stuff that we think about in connection with astrology today.
So this is at the heart of medieval science, very much the sort of thing that university professors and so on would be debating.
And they decide that there were these astrological events which probably caused various things to happen to people’s humours.
And they grapple with all the same sort of stuff we would do, right?
If this is to do with the stars, then why do some people get sick and other people don’t get sick?
Why are some communities affected worse than other communities and so on?
So there’s this whole kind of scientific debate.
Other people say, oh, it’s not to do with that.
It’s to do with some kind of…
The emergence of gases from the centre of the earth, which creates this sort of miasma and that sort of wafts across and people are breathing it in and that causes humoral imbalance and so on.
So there are all these competing explanations, very much like there is when we get a modern, you know, modern disease.
When Covid came along, there were all these different explanations, weren’t there?
Was this something that was transmitted to humans in a…
you know, a fish market in China somewhere?
Was this something that escaped from a laboratory?
Whatever it might be.
The same kind of process of scientific debate amongst medieval scientists.
That, I think, raises the question of blame.
We always like to blame things on groups or peoples or others.
So who…
Who did they blame the plague on?
Was it like, was it your enemy neighbors?
Was it a religious group?
Outsiders.
Outsiders.
Was it foreigners?
Yeah.
Well, the most shocking and appalling, or one of the most shocking and appalling things at the time of the Black Death is the targeted violence towards Jewish people, because some people in the Middle Ages, especially prior to the arrival of the Black Death, think that this disease that they’re hearing about is caused by…
Jewish people and that causation can take different forms.
So some of it is a kind of conspiracy theory, this idea that Jewish people are deliberately poisoning wells, that Christians are then drinking from those wells and getting sick.
And there’s another sort of broad framework that people have where.
They’re living in communities with Christians and Jews together.
And people argue that that makes God angry because Christians weren’t meant to live with Jews.
And therefore, you know, that anger is expressed through plague and therefore the Jews need to be targeted and murdered.
I mean, the whole thing is really horrible and really appalling and also very problematic.
in terms of medieval explanations, because medieval people can see that Jewish people in their communities are dying of the Black Death as well as Christians.
So it’s obviously the conspiracy theory doesn’t really stand up very well.
But the evidence is really heartbreaking.
There’s a very famous case in a town, it’s not far from here, in Spain, in Catalonia, called Targa.
and we know from documentary evidence that there was an awful series of attacks and murders of jewish people in targa in 1348 associated with the black death and then in you know those documents obviously go back to the time period itself but then just a few years ago some jewish cemeteries were excavated in targa and they found the actual bones of those people who were murdered in those attacks
And the archaeological evidence was almost even more shocking than the documentary evidence, because you could tell that some of those victims were elderly folk who were obviously not able to escape from the pursuers and were murdered in the most brutal fashion.
So, you know, I talked before about how medieval people didn’t panic and so on at the time of the Black Death, but some of them certainly saw fit to perpetrate these awful acts of violence.
in a very illogical fashion that was obvious obvious to medieval people that you know that jews were vulnerable to although i guess before the arrival of the black death that might not have been so clear to them so they were taking they thought they were taking um preventative action but yeah it’s it’s a really really awful episode men women and children burned alive and all this sort of stuff that is unfortunate i mean it always is and i i i
It does seem like conspiracies that blame the Jews is like it’s the go to for Europe and America, apparently.
So, well, we have a lot of Europeans who migrated here.
I think we brought those terrible ideas with us.
But I just it’s kind of heartbreaking.
But I found it surprising that.
And correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t see a similar sort of scapegoating being applied to Islam or to Muslims.
So, but yet, you know, different…
They were newer, well, relatively newer.
Yeah, but I mean, they controlled…
Spain from, what, the 700s to the 14th?
It was a long period and certainly were well known.
And I know that there were also, but am I missing the boat there?
Were Islamic people, were Muslims, I should say Muslims, were Muslims being blamed at all or was it pretty much just Jewish people?
I mean, it’s targeted mostly at the Jews and it’s partly because there are more Christian communities throughout the rest of Europe where there are larger Jewish populations than there were Muslim populations.
Outside of the Iberian Peninsula, clearly, you know, Muslims were travelling into Northern Europe and so on, but there weren’t large communities of Muslims in
most European towns, whereas I don’t know about most, but many European towns had Jewish Jewish communities there.
There’s a whole sort of like theological aspect to this, too, because obviously Christians were blaming Jews for the murder of Christ.
And that gives a special sort of religious take there.
hatred of Jewish people in the Middle Ages was seemingly different from what happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
It very much racialized, right?
The representation of the Jews as racially different and racially inferior led the Nazis to target them with that kind of pseudoscience.
Whereas in the Middle Ages, it wasn’t really a racial objection to the Jews so much as an objection to their religion, their religiosity, and the fact that it was intolerable
for Jews, for some medieval Christians, for Jews to exist in their communities because of that, you know, history of sort of killing Christ and not accepting Christ and so on.
And the blood libel was from the 1100s.
And so, I mean, the myth of the blood libel lasted for…
I mean, a long time from the 1100s to now.
And it all gets wrapped up into this sort of racialized stuff in the modern period.
But as you say, from the time of the Crusades and so on, you’re getting all these sort of myths and so on about the way that the Jews are behaving.
And it’s another conspiracy theory, isn’t it?
This idea that these people are powerful, they’re different from us, they’re doing nasty things, they want to target us, they want to get us and so on.
And I think that, you know, this is a…
a sad sort of take isn’t it on human nature but this is what human beings do in times of in times of crisis is try and find somebody to blame and then take out that frustration well we’re a very pro-science show here no matter what uh our current uh head of uh medical here in the united states says you would be surprised by just how wildly wrong he can be when he is spouting alarming official sounding statistics
We are 4.2% of the world’s population.
We buy 70% of the pharmaceutical drugs on Earth.
15% of American youth are now on Adderall or some other ADHD medication.
When I was a kid, I always say this.
A typical pediatrician would see one case of diabetes in his lifetime.
Today, it’s one out of every three kids who walks through his office door.
20 years ago, there was no diabetes in China.
Today, 50% of the population is diabetic.
So here’s the thing.
All the numbers you just heard him say are bullshit.
Americans don’t buy 70% of the drugs on Earth.
We buy around 6%.
15% of American youth aren’t on ADHD meds.
Estimates put it closer to 5%.
One in three kids don’t have diabetes.
It’s actually 0.35%, or one in 285 kids.
And the rate of diabetes in China is roughly 12%, not, as I think you already know, 50%.
Half of all the people in China do not have diabetes.
I think that this sad period could come back at any moment, unfortunately.
But I guess it has.
It’s like I just it breaks my heart that it’s again, I keep coming back lately to the epistemological problem that people who don’t use.
science, evidence, logic, reason as their methodology for making their decisions are never going to agree with you when you have good evidence because that’s not how they’re making their decisions in the first place.
And it’s really problematic when you’re trying to actually get people to change their position.
So, yeah.
Ryan, your podcast is about monsters, isn’t it?
And this is the way in which people create monsters.
They monsterize.
Because they need them, don’t they?
They need the monsters in order to be able to explain the horrors that they’re enduring.
Well, and we’d love to say, well, you know, witches aren’t real, but aren’t they fun at Halloween?
Except witches…
may never have been real, but they’re always still a real threat to be accused of witchcraft.
You can still be murdered for being a witch.
You can still be in terrible jeopardy.
That’s the real fear.
Right.
It’s not about the cool, spooky story.
It’s about the horror of being accused.
We found a witch!
We found a witch!
We found a witch!
We have found a witch!
May we burn her?
Burn her!
that is very difficult to defend yourself against accusations that are based on magical thinking.
It’s just really, really hard.
So, yeah, we talk about this too.
We love monsters in the spooky sense, but the horrors are real right now and have always been.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, Ben, earlier you were talking about your students and their exposure to pop culture about the Black Death.
Could you talk a little bit about how it’s been portrayed in books and movies and documentaries and even video games?
And is there any kind of depiction out there that you think gets it right or any that really gets it wrong?
Yeah, I mean, there’s so much, isn’t there?
And there’s so much really sort of good stuff.
It’s central to popular culture and the way that we think about, you know, what the Middle Ages were, the way that we distance ourselves from the Middle Ages, that we want to feel that we are modern and that we are protected against all this sort of stuff.
And they were medieval and so on.
And so it makes for a really good kind of story.
And the, you know, the most famous one, the Monty Python one with the bring out your dead sketches all over YouTube and so on.
Here’s one.
Ninepence.
I’m not dead.
What?
Nothing.
Here’s your ninepence.
I’m not dead.
Here.
He says he’s not dead.
Yes, he is.
I’m not.
He isn’t.
Well, he will be soon.
He’s very ill.
I’m getting better.
No, you’re not.
You’ll be stone dead in a moment.
We’re a long way from Monty Python, right, in chronology now, but, you know, folk love Monty Python and, you know, young people too are sort of enjoying it for the first time.
And I think it’s a particularly clever sketch, right, because it’s making fun of exactly this kind of misconception.
It’s making fun of the way that we represent medieval people as, you know, eating mud, hopelessly filthy, chucking people in plague carts before they’re even dead and so on.
And it’s actually a mockery of these assumptions that we make.
It’s, you know, a very smart piece of comedy on the part of Monty Python.
They were educated, yeah.
I think they were historians, yeah.
I think Michael Palin and Terry Jones were both historians.
Yeah, absolutely.
And they really knew what they were talking about when they were depicting that.
There are some great ones, though.
There’s a really good science fiction book by Connie Willis called Doomsday Book, which is part of a series that she wrote about.
A team of scholars at Oxford University devise a method of time travel and they send historians back to the past.
And they…
accidentally send some people back to the past in the time of the black death which you know some way sound doesn’t sound the most promising of sort of framing for a narrative but it’s the depiction of what it’s like at the time of the black death that i think is really good in that novel she really researched it and it brings home the awful personal tragedy of
the just being there in the mid 14th century at that time you know children wandering about the place because they’ve lost both their parents and all other family members and they just don’t know what to do it’s a desperate awful tragic situation um so you know within the framework of science fiction with very much sort of popular you know popular literature and so on there’s a really sort of engaging and detailed and historical representation of the black death
My own personal bugbear on this one, the one that really gets my goat, there’s a book by Ken Follett that’s the sequel.
He wrote Pillars of the Earth, which is a famous one about the construction of a cathedral.
And there’s a book, the big book that he wrote is a sequel called The World Without End, which should probably be called The Book Without End because it’s extremely long.
And there’s a very annoying representation of the Black Death there.
It goes through all of the sort of horrors of it and so on, which is sort of fine.
And some of it’s kind of documented.
But then he has this community where somebody comes in with these almost modern ideas that, like a modern person, they’ve looked around them and observed what’s happening.
So they encourage everybody to wear these face masks and
you know really reduces the mortality because they’re stopping the infection but then all the medieval people come along and say that’s got nothing to do with the transmission of disease and so on this is silly stop people wearing those face masks and it’s this sort of patronizing notion that if only medieval people behaved a bit more like us then they would have been just fine they just needed to be a little bit more modern um and they would have been okay look how superstitious and ignorant they were and they can’t really sort of cope with that
And I think that it’s really the opposite of getting to grips with the Middle Ages, that stuff, isn’t it?
That sort of very condescending attitude of we are superior, we are modern, they were stupid.
I mean, the book’s awful in lots of other ways, too.
It’s misogynistic and unpleasant representation of female characters and so on.
But the representation of the Black Death in that is the one that I dislike most.
Wow.
I’ll issue you that one.
Thank you so much for talking with us tonight.
Now, your book is called Myths and Memories of the Black Death, and I’ll put a link to that in the show notes.
Thank you.
And this is so fascinating.
We could talk on and on about this.
I know you don’t have to come back.
There’s some areas that intersect with what we talk about.
But I want if you could leave our listeners with one surprising fact, it doesn’t have to be uplifting.
It’s up to you.
But just one surprising fact about the black that they they might not know because of all these misrepresentations.
What would that be?
I would go for what we were talking about earlier, about things getting so much better for so many people pretty quickly after the Black Death, because we think that it’s the ultimate doom and gloom, that it’s the end of everything, that it undermines society and so on.
And it obviously was in some ways, it’s horrible, but it didn’t undermine society.
And some people found themselves with lives that were rapidly much better in the aftermath.
Well, I say some people, a lot of people, right?
We’re talking about ordinary folk, peasants, you know, the less wealthy social groups.
Especially inheritance lawyers.
That is really interesting.
I think I heard that from…
James Burke, either in his Connection series or maybe in The Day the Universe Changed, he talked a little bit about that.
And the peasants?
Well, thanks to that loom way back and the fact that flax is cheap to grow, linen was their thing.
Well, it was everybody’s thing, really, in hats and shirts and bed sheets.
And especially if you take an indiscreet look up the nearest girl’s skirt.
underwear and just this once that’s the great historical trigger of change what you’re looking at now yes frilly knickers fascinating uh to see i again it’s hard to find an upside when there’s piles of corpses on the street but yeah there was some upside so yeah life keeps going on so
Yeah, Ben, to echo what Blake said, it’s just been great to talk with you, and I’m so fascinated by this topic.
So we’ve been around since 2009, and I’m astonished we haven’t talked about this before.
We’ve touched upon it, but it’s just been great to chat with you.
We’ve got one final question, though, that we ask all of our first-time guests.
It’s our signature question, and that is, what’s your favourite monster?
I was thinking about this one.
This is a great question to think about.
And I think mine is very definitely the Green Children of Woolpit.
You know the story from these.
Late 12th and 13th century, two chroniclers describe something happening in the mid 12th century where these two children with green tinned skin mysteriously appear in a village.
I won’t go on about it because I’m sure you know about this.
It’s a famous… We do, but our listeners may not.
Yeah, yeah.
if you want to summarize, that’s fine.
We’ve never done a whole episode about it, but it is one.
I love this story.
So yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I, I no doubt there’s kind of prosaic explanation for this, but it really isn’t clear to me what that is, right.
That there’s been all these suggestions and they’re, you know, kind of plausible, but it’s really hard to ground them in the evidence.
And.
I don’t know, who knows what’s going on and what was going on.
And it’s really fun to speculate about what the possibilities are for where those children might have come from.
And interesting the way that this idea takes off so quickly as well.
Even in the early modern period, they’re already saying that these children fell from the moon or whatever it might be.
So it’s kind of connected to early science fiction too, that really fascinating story.
Indeed.
We’ll put some links in the show notes for that as well.
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us and for working in education.
The world needs this.
Yeah, for sure.
It’s been really great.
Well, thank you so much to you both.
It’s been a real pleasure talking to you.
Thank you for staying up for us.
I appreciate it.
Yeah, it was quite late.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard an interview with Dr. Benjamin Dodds telling us about the Black Death, a disease which killed millions in Europe in the 1300s and which is still a pestilence humans deal with to this very day.
His book is Myths and Memories of the Black Death, and a link to it is in the show notes.
There are still fascinating mysteries being debated and studied about both the historical impact and mechanisms of this disease, as well as how human resistance and immune responses have changed over the centuries.
This is not a story merely of history, but one actively affecting people today.
And if you’re interested, perhaps your own research could one day help answer some of these questions.
As always, I hope that this discussion has inspired you to go learn more.
Check the show notes for some links to help your quest.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of Monster Talk.
Each episode, we strive to bring you the very best in monster-related content with a focus on bringing scientific skepticism into the conversation.
If you enjoy Monster Talk, we now have a variety of ways to support the show, all with convenient links at monstertalk.org forward slash support.
That’s monstertalk.org forward slash support.
We have links there to our Patreon page as well as a donation button.
Another great way to support the show is to buy books from our Amazon Monster Talk wishlist, which directly helps us with our research.
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Monster Talk’s theme music is by Pete Stealing Monkeys.
On second thoughts, let’s not go to Camelot.
It is a silly place.
This has been a Monster House presentation.

The post ☠️S05E42 – THE BLACK DEATH🐀 appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Blake and Karen welcome back paranormal investigator Matthew Baxter to sift through the latest government UAP release – the so-called PURSUE document dump – and work out what, if anything, is actually in it. Baxter took on the job of reading the paperwork so nobody else has to, and he returns with a skeptic’s field report on what the government handed over, and what it quietly left out.

From a Nevada billionaire’s decades-long influence campaign to a $22 million taxpayer-funded hunt for the strange at a remote Utah ranch, the trio traces how fringe belief got bootstrapped into official policy – and asks whether the whole disclosure spectacle is meant to illuminate anything at all, or just to bury the question under an avalanche of unanalyzed data. Along the way: anglerfish, ice cream cones, and an epistemological war we didn’t even know we’d been drafted into.

What’s Inside What “PURSUE” actually stands for – and what the release did and didn’t include
AARO decoded: why “all-domain” is more than a rebrand
The billionaire whose private money quietly seeded decades of official UFO research
The “two agendas” baked into disclosure from the start (hint: it was never only about spacecraft)
A former government UAP chief’s memorable verdict on the whole enterprise
The anglerfish test: what real extraordinary evidence actually looks like
The “epistemological war” – and why skeptics feel like they brought a calculator to a shouting match
What some disclosure advocates are really hoping to find out there

Rough RoadmapApproximate start times – they’ll shift a little with the final edit.

~01:51 – Setting the scene: what is PURSUE?
~03:30 – Breaking down the AARO acronym
~06:30 – The Bigelow origin story and the “two agendas”
~11:31 – The central skeptical finding
~17:05 – “Self-licking ice cream cone”
~19:20 – The anglerfish analogy
~21:03 – The epistemological war
~29:46 – Ultra-terrestrials and hyperdimensional beings
~35:07 – AAWSAP: it already happened

Who Turns Up Matthew Baxter – paranormal investigator and returning guest, on documents duty
Robert Bigelow – the aerospace billionaire behind much of modern UFO research
Sean Kirkpatrick – AARO’s founding director
Mick West – debunker, Metabunk founder, and past MonsterTalk guest
Art Bell – late-night paranormal radio pioneer
Carl Sagan – patron saint of “extraordinary claims”

Episode LinksAll-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (Wikipedia)
United States UFO Files (Wikipedia)
National Institute for Discovery Science (Wikipedia)
AARO UAP Records – official imagery and document releases
The PURSUE Portal – Department of War
Metabunk – Mick West’s investigation and debunking forum

Dig Deeper The Black Vault – the largest civilian repository of FOIA’d government UFO/UAP documents, handy for cross-referencing PURSUE against the historical record
Metabunk / Sitrec – home of Mick West’s interactive 3D tool for recreating the frame-of-reference artifacts discussed in the episode
National Security Archive (GWU) – academic-grade collections of declassified national-security documents, including UAP-related material

Recommended Reading UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life – Garrett M. Graff
A comprehensive journalistic account of the government’s decades of UFO/UAP investigations, drawing on declassified documents and interviews.

Skinwalkers at the Pentagon – James T. Lacatski, Colm Kelleher & George Knapp
The insider account of AAWSAP from the DIA official who championed it – best read skeptically alongside AARO’s historical record report.

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark – Carl Sagan
The foundational text for science-based skepticism, and the source of the “extraordinary claims” standard the hosts are defending.

Escaping the Rabbit Hole – Mick West
The Metabunk founder goes beyond debunking to examine the psychology of conspiracy belief – directly relevant to this episode’s frame.

Hunt for the Skinwalker – Colm Kelleher & George Knapp
The original popular account of the NIDS investigation at Skinwalker Ranch – useful for understanding what the money was actually studying.

Mirage Men – Mark Pilkington
Argues much of UFO mythology was deliberately seeded as intelligence-service disinformation – a provocative fit with the episode’s “influence campaign” thread.

How to Think – Alan Jacobs
Explores how people form beliefs and why tribal epistemologies are so durable – close to the episode’s “epistemological war” theme.

PromotionsPick up Karen’s book, Beyond Words .
More from our guest: Matthew Baxter .

CreditsMonsterTalk theme music by Peach Stealing Monkeys

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It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24 mile long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland.
It’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
Hey there, Monster Talkers.
I’m just going to get us right into this week’s discussion about the latest tranche of documents related to Disclosure Day.
Not the latest Spielberg movie, but the fantasy concept upon which it’s based.
That our government, and perhaps governments around the world, are hiding their secret awareness of non-earthly intelligences and are going to spring that on us any day now.
I have some things to say about that, but I want to save them until after our discussion within this episode because I don’t want to detract from all the work Matt Baxter did going through the documents.
So stick around for a few minutes after our chat, and I’ll share a few thoughts about this that the discussion inspired.
And thanks again to Matt for going through the documents for us.
And I’ll catch up with you all after our Monster Talk.
So you guys, you looked at that new tranche of UAP documents.
Is that what’s going on?
Well, I looked at them and have some thoughts.
Okay.
Well, who are you?
Who am I?
Where are we?
Who are any of us?
Why are we here?
So welcome to Monster Talk again, I guess.
That’s the question.
I think we should change the name to UFO Talk.
UFO Talk.
Okay.
Talking about UFOs so much.
EBEs.
Yeah, well.
It’s still a monster.
It is.
It is.
And if it turns out, if it’s like Jordan Peele, they turn out to be biological, you know, then obviously they do totally count, right?
Right.
I don’t know if you watched Nope.
Nope.
Oh.
Nope.
So what are we talking about?
Disclosure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So sorry.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
Yeah.
And today we’re welcoming back Matthew Baxter.
Yay.
All right.
Cool.
We did it.
I don’t want to make the whole episode about my obsession, but there is this group of people that really, it began in the 90s with Robert Bigelow.
And his nids skin Walker ranch group.
Yeah.
But they’ve, they’ve crossed.
I think maybe like with that New York times article that hit, what was that?
2017.
I think they, they really cross some.
What is the word?
tipping point and now the general public thinks there’s something big going on when in fact it is the same group of influencers continuing to echo chamber their way into our hearts and minds yes but stomachs they they’ve managed coming right after our cattle mutilations talk but i i uh we did just talk about animal mutilations which
in these modern times it really is almost always tied into ufos and aliens so yes yeah yeah we talked about that so what are we talking about math this is about you know there’s been some government disclosure that’s been going on by uh the or the uh the the office is arrow and that’s a a r o
And the name is interesting.
Yes, it is.
Because it stands for all domain is the first A.
And what that means is they’re kind of investigating all domains, not just air.
Because, you know, UFO was a flying object in the air.
But these investigate things in anything anomalous in the air, space, sea.
underwater, on the earth?
Do you think transmedium that goes between these domains?
So that’s what all domain means.
It doesn’t mean that it’s all web domains.
That’s what I was going to say.
When I think of domains, I think of the web.
Or linguistics.
I think about speech domains.
So I guess this is a…
register specific thing for ufos yeah this is operational poisoning um well that’s that’s domain so a little different and then the second a is the second a is anomaly and that’s so they’re not assuming an object is a craft or a physical object they’re talking about anything anomalous in military or intelligence reporting
And then resolution.
They took a leaf out of the book of kind of anomalous phenomena with that.
Probably.
I think it’s a nod and a wink to their secret agenda, which is not that secret, which is because this is all being driven by funding from Bigelow, who in turn is trying to make it government funded.
And in order to do that, he has to make the government believe it’s really going on.
So again, the echo chamber pays off with…
agencies and endorsements because there’s plenty of people in america who think if the government’s researching it that’s an endorsement it’s real right so so but all along going all the way back to when he was supporting art bell before coast to coast preceding program was made possible by a grant from the bigelow foundation
This has been Area 2000, a program that introduces our listeners to the scientific approach for discussion of two particular subjects, UFOs and near-death and after-death experiences.
They advertised that the Bigelow’s research was about two things, these mysteries, these aerial mysteries, that sort of thing, and also…
consciousness and they don’t mean how does consciousness form within the human mind or within the brain they talk about consciousness they’re talking about survival of your individuality or your spirit after you die so it’s always been there baked in
Wow, it’s a long boat to draw.
It is indeed.
But I think that using this all domain anomaly thing, it allows them to get the government to pay for research into ghosts and entities that don’t live in our bodies or the survival of consciousness, all that stuff.
That’s my opinion.
Based on strong evidence.
Okay, so.
Well, you know, one of the interesting things about this is that they’re one of the approaches is to create an avalanche of sort of information.
So you can’t take it all in, but there’s so much that you’re going, wow, this is a lot.
So something’s going on.
Yeah, things happening here, but they miss it.
So speaking of which, that also makes show topics like this with with three people like herding cats.
because so far we have gotten through the two A’s in AARO.
That’s just us.
We mean rounding up, not harming, herding cats, right?
Right, right, right.
We don’t want to…
We don’t want to brand them or anything like that.
But I will tell you that every meow is equally important because there’s so much information being piled on.
You have to sort through every meow.
All right.
Next letter, please.
Trench, right?
Oh, yeah.
I forgot.
We’re still working on the acronyms.
Sorry.
So the next letter is R, and that’s resolution.
So the office’s mission is to identify or explain reports whenever possible.
An unresolved case simply means there wasn’t enough information to reach a confident conclusion.
Now, that’s really important to kind of underline that.
If it’s not resolved, it doesn’t mean aliens.
It means they don’t have enough information to reach a confident conclusion.
And then the O…
I was still going to say for resolution, it still makes me think of the internet.
No, true, true.
Yeah.
We’re monitoring the situation.
And the O at the end is for OMG.
No, it’s actually, it’s actually office.
So, and that, so no, the O is for office.
And really that serves two purposes.
It’s a joint department.
Exactly.
It does sound very governmental and very, you know, official.
Yes, yes.
It’s kind of that thing that I can’t remember that we skeptics use all the time.
No.
Appeal to authority.
Appeal to authority.
Yeah, yeah.
I was about to just start rattling off things skeptics use all the time.
Thank you.
So we got the, yep, Blake’s got his toolbox open and he’s ready to go.
My skeptical toolbox.
So it’s a joint Department of Defense office that also works with the intelligence community, which is hilarious to hear those words, FAA, NASA, and other agencies.
So it sounds really official, and there’s a lot of authority here.
But this is what the AAR was actually tasked with.
Its charter says it’s supposed to collect reports of UAPs.
analyze sensor data and witness reports, assess whether sightings pose a national security or flight safety risk, determine whether incidents involve foreign technology, U.S. classified programs, ordinary objects or natural phenomena, sensor errors, or something that remains unexplained.
So they’re determining, trying to determine all these things.
Now, here’s one of the interesting things that I saw with this disclosure that they did.
They did none of these things.
They didn’t do anything, except for the collect reports.
But they didn’t analyze anything.
They just vomited it out with no information.
Now, there was some good things that they did do.
And that is cool, but it’s more for historical stuff.
They did release some stuff that’s not videos.
It’s just declassified paperwork.
So on a lot of these older reports, you get the original observations before decades of retelling.
And that’s useful for the historical aspect because it lets you compare what the witnesses actually said and what later UFO books claim they said.
So you get that contrast and that’s very important.
And then they had more context around unresolved military reports.
So you have reports where pilots or radar operators simply say, I don’t know what that was.
And that’s great.
It’s important, but it’s not extraordinary.
An unresolved report is not evidence of an alien craft.
I’m just wondering at this point, how much credence is the government giving to this group, this organization?
Well, if they do what their charter is, plenty.
You know, their task is to be very critical thinking about it, very methodical about it.
But the disclosure action wasn’t.
You know what I mean?
They released all these videos and still images with very little information.
So it’s basically, I don’t know what that is, but the government sees it and the government says that they think it’s special.
They think that there’s something to this because it’s unresolved.
Why would they want to align themselves to this?
Because it just seems so marginal.
Okay.
It’s popular in the public.
And I don’t know if you’ve heard about this, but a lot of the politicians these days are really into trying to appear as though they care about the things that normal people care about.
What, like education and health care?
No, no.
Things that normal people care about that don’t actually have a, there’s no legislation required.
All you have to do is pretend to care.
And then you don’t actually have to accomplish it.
This is a really good thing for political action because there’s no law coming out of it.
There’s no legislation.
It’s just sounding to me like the BFRO for UFOs.
Yeah, that’s about right.
This is a great way to distract on what the latest scandal was.
That’s that’s really and it worked great.
It was a great distraction.
I don’t know how many people I heard talking about this and the things that everybody found really interesting.
You know, I went and I looked at it and it’s not like I said, the files that they released.
that they declassified.
There’s some cool stuff in there that actually helps us skeptics do a comparison between what was originally said and what was said later by the UFO books and UFO conferences and things like that.
So that’s really important stuff.
But the images that they released…
There was no recovered craft documentation.
There was no chain of custody records.
There was no authenticated alien biological evidence.
There was no engineering reports.
There were no convincing multi-sensor cases with complete data.
Nothing.
So what were the images like?
What are we talking about?
The exact same things we’ve seen.
These radar images that you can’t tell what they are, satellite imagery, you can’t tell what it is.
Just like one single camera catching something moving isn’t explained.
We’ve talked a lot, and we actually interviewed Mick West from Metabunk.
And, you know, each one of these cases by itself has to be…
examined according to the merits of whatever was captured and a lot of these things what happens is something happens it gets captured as an incident but that’s not what is brought to the public what’s brought to the public is a story and the stories are exciting and they’re coming from people within the government
which gives them a bunch of extra weight because I, again, when we had Jerry Drake on here who works for the government and he was talking about how the government’s not a monolith, you know, but it’s still, it’s like anchoring.
It has like that reality anchoring or plausibility anchoring because it’s coming from a government agency, which is ironic because it’s ironic to me because
The people who are conspiratorial largely don’t trust the government.
Yeah.
Government distrust is one of the reasons this exists.
But when it’s something they want to be true, if the government’s looking into it, that somehow endorses it or strengthens it.
Hypocrisy.
Yeah.
This is really funny.
The first director of AARO was a scientist named Sean Kirkpatrick.
And he’s not in charge anymore, or he’s not the director anymore.
But he called it a circular claims network and referred to it as a self-licking ice cream cone, which strongly, strongly matches my assessment of this being an influence campaign.
I’m like, okay, I would not mind talking to Sean Kirkpatrick.
He sounds like he’s got their number.
I mean, I’m not outraged at the government looking into these things.
I’m outraged that…
they fall in for this influence.
It took it more than 20 years.
I mean, it’s like closer to 30, uh, for this to actually new to come out.
Right.
I mean, and when it does come out, like the whole thing is like, if you go to MetaBunk, you look at the facts, a lot of this stuff emerged when they put in new sensor systems and they haven’t learned how to filter out the noise.
So they’re getting all these false positives or they’re seeing something, you know, again, a lot of the discussion on MetaBunk, um,
lays out very clearly if you take the time to see how that something up close appears to be moving supernaturally fast but it’s not is you know it’s a frame of reference situation perception exactly and there’s a lot of that that happens and and i bet you somewhere in this stuff there’s some genuinely interesting mysteries but but
That doesn’t justify paranormal still.
Right, right.
They don’t, I don’t think they care.
At large, I don’t think they care whether they prove or don’t prove anything.
What they want is for these stories to be perpetually in the people’s minds because it reinforces their agenda.
Yeah, right, exactly.
Which they call it a trench, you know, this body of documents that get released.
I mean, it’s a lot for anybody to go through.
It’s overwhelming.
It’s a dump.
It is a dump.
Yeah.
It’s what they do.
Spread on my mind.
Sorry.
Yeah.
Now, here’s the thing.
So here’s one of the interesting things is the standard of evidence that the UFO community will accept compared to just normal society or scientific community.
So let’s say if someone in the 1700s claimed that there was this fish that
at the bottom of the ocean that had glowing lures, needle-like teeth, and the males permanently fused to the females, that would sound pretty absurd.
But once the explorers recovered specimens and zoologists could examine them, you could see preserved anglerfish in museums, researchers could have sequenced the DNA, observed their anatomy.
We know they’re real.
We don’t have a blurry picture or 500 blurry pictures and say, believe this.
This is real.
We have a higher standard of evidence for everything else.
COVID.
We had people that did not believe COVID was a real thing.
But what did we do?
We kept bringing more and more evidence that proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Yeah.
And it was different evidence from different, you know, mediums.
So it wasn’t just one.
Here’s a picture of a COVID virus.
You know, we didn’t just do that.
We were able to give so much different evidence to say that this is a real thing.
That sort of stuff drives me nuts on Facebook at the moment.
Just anytime anything comes up about vaccinations and, you know, we’ve eradicated this or just information from science organizations and just people using the laughing emoji.
It’s like, I mean, this stuff is undeniable and yet they’re just laughing at it.
So I’m firmly of the opinion that we’re in an epistemological war.
So it’s not even about the information, because if we were trying to tackle this information using critical thinking and evidence, some of it is still ambiguous, but a lot of it clearly doesn’t have what it takes to pass muster.
But we’re not in that conversation because…
The sides are not pro or con.
The sides are, do you use evidence-based thinking or do you think from your gut?
And that’s a different epistemology.
And it’s very difficult to win an argument with someone who is literally, literally not playing the same game.
And I think that’s what we’re running into.
It is very frustrating for skeptics.
If you think of yourself as a rationalist, you’re using a lot of evidence and critical thinking.
And that’s how you want to approach the world.
We know there’s things that are not going to fall into an easy category.
There’s things that are ambiguous.
But that’s not again, that’s the battle we trained for for years.
And that’s not the battle we’re having.
We’re having the battle of not because I said so.
And that is really hard to win.
Yeah.
Playground logic.
Yeah.
But that’s who’s in charge now.
That’s who’s running things.
I want to make sure that the vaccine is sound and has passed muster and is safe is very different from the, I don’t believe in vaccines and this is all nonsense.
Please take more vitamins.
That’s a different thing.
Drink Clorox.
Anyway, so this is an extraordinarily frustrating time and it’s hard to give advice because I think the general person in the public, if they’re feeling like me, they’re feeling like, well, I guess the best I can do is try to make good decisions on my own because clearly the authorities are no longer using the same playbook, right?
Tricky stuff.
You’re going to have to bleep me here in a moment, but Tim mentioned, I think said it really well when he was talking about people that said the theory of evolution is just a theory.
And he wishes those people would treat the theory of gravity the same way and float the fuck away.
Now that you mention it, I love it.
So, yeah, you know, because when we talk about, like I said, the anglerfish, when we talk about that, we have a situation where the evidence compounds.
And with UFO stuff or…
Bigfoot or ghosts, the pattern’s almost the exact opposite.
They take, it just cycles through kind of eyewitness testimony, ambiguous photographs, blurry videos, radar returns without corroborating data, and official acknowledgements that something was identified.
And that’s all they have.
Now, like you said about ambiguity a moment ago,
You’ve got, say, Carl Sagan.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
But the thing is, is you can have one extraordinary claim.
It doesn’t require one piece of extraordinary evidence.
It requires the reduction of ambiguity.
So you need compounding evidence.
You can’t just have one piece of evidence for one claim and say, well, that’s it.
That’s proof.
You need the continuous reduction of ambiguity, and we don’t get that.
So, you know, every scientific discovery from dinosaurs to black holes to giant squids or exoplanets, you know, that’s involved evidence becoming less ambiguous over time.
Like you said, we get better instruments.
We have more observations.
We have independent confirmation, reproducible analysis, and the uncertainty narrows down.
And that’s what the big difference is because the UFO field doesn’t use any of that.
And, you know, I’m in a different room than Karen’s in right now.
And I don’t know if she can see me gesturing like a madman as I’m saying all this.
I can.
I feel like you’re going to hit me.
So I apologize for that.
I feel kind of passionate about it.
But yeah, it is very frustrating because nothing new was given to us.
That’s exactly what I was going to ask.
So there’s nothing new here.
Even though there’s so much to do being made about it, this is just rehashing everything all over again.
Well, the UFO community really likes visual stuff.
And we skeptics like documentation.
And the visual stuff told us nothing.
The documentation gave us good historical records to compare with UFO conferences and UFO books.
And so the documentation has been very valuable, I think, to the skeptical mind.
And the visual stuff is nothing new.
It’s a lack of information.
You know, that’s the big difference.
Documentation brought us information.
The visual stuff brought us the lack of information.
Well, the information drops they’re giving are here’s the data with no contextualization or analysis as well.
That’s it’s this is which almost if I were a conspiratorial, I would say this feels more like a distraction than actually useful data.
Right.
Yeah.
So, you know, I don’t know what we’re supposed to do with this except be distracted.
And I don’t know what again, I wouldn’t want to conjecture too much about.
Is that a verb?
I wouldn’t want to project.
I don’t want to spend too much time imagining why they might want us to be distracted.
I think that the people behind the releases.
want us all to be talking about this stuff and so leaving it as vague as possible and leaving it to the public to do the analysis is is one way to to push conversation it’s about like it’s kind of like me saying uh sound off in the chat room we’d like to hear what you think because we apparently think nothing that’s what we think yeah yeah yep and and it is interesting because
You know, the scientific community likes their evidence in a certain way.
The UFO sort of community likes the lack of evidence because they can then have their distrust of the government come in.
The best evidence is classified.
The crass retrieval program is hidden.
The bodies can’t be examined.
The proof exists, but you can’t see it.
And that doesn’t function as evidence, but it does in their minds.
And so when we get the government that goes here, bleh, oh, see, we knew it.
But it’s a lot like when politicians put out these big proposals that happen to be thousands of pages long.
No one can read it all.
So no one reads it at all.
And that’s kind of how these disclosure dumps are.
Which, by the way, I’ve seen them called PERSU.
I didn’t realize that was an acronym.
And so that stands for, I love this, Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters.
so pursue yeah presidential yeah which tells you what you’re being distracted from yeah it kind of does yeah yeah anyway excuse me sorry all right that’s exactly exactly what you said it and i didn’t so yeah we’re all thinking it right yeah i was trying to see what they’ve distracted from but it was so overwhelming i ran away from it i ran away from it exactly exactly
Well, it all sounds pretty mundane.
Much to do about nothing.
As a skeptical listener, assuming you are, even if you’re not, you know what?
You don’t have to label yourself to use these tools of analysis.
Yes, exactly.
Be whatever camp you want to, but try to use critical thinking.
And I think, again, I’m not pushing a conspiracy theory.
I don’t have one.
I just think, except that I think the same individuals pushing for this narrative, and they do absolutely have an agenda beyond trying to prove the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Because if you go actually see what’s going on out there, these people are not looking for invaders from another planet.
They’re looking for ultra terrestrials, demonic entities, all sorts of things.
Hyperdimensional.
Hyperdimensional from within the earth, whatever, anything except for let’s use physics and what we know about the scientific method to analyze these things and see if there’s a possible answer because they don’t want those answers.
If they did, again, they would lean into the people who do this.
It’s not full time, at least for a serious hobby.
The people in the community likes to analyze this kind of evidence to see if eliminate the possibility that it’s just something normal.
And that’s why, again, I tend to enjoy this stuff over at Metabunk because there’s a lot of discussion about it.
And they use, again, good physics and science to try to figure out what’s really going on.
Yeah, but they’re preaching to the choir, unfortunately.
Well, exactly, right?
And if you go to Reddit, you’ll get different opinions.
But I mean, all of these, without being there and without having firsthand sensory data, we’re limited to what is available from the logs or the videos.
And there’s a very finite amount that can be extracted from that information, especially when no one bothers to actually…
give you more context.
So I feel like volume over quality seems to be the rule here.
And again, that’s because they want to perpetuate their echo chamber or self-licking ice cream cone, whatever.
We’ll be hearing more about that, I’m thinking.
I think so too.
One of the interesting things is I’ve heard just from being in my workplace at work, several people are discussing this disclosure with such excitement because you look and they’ve got like a UFO tattoo on their calf or whatever.
And they’re excited about it.
And I’ve kept myself from saying anything to them.
But in contrast to that, I’ve looked at different news networks that have run stories on this and then put those on YouTube.
And the comment sections are just…
How stupid do they think we are, you know, that they can pass this off as evidence of anything?
And we’re getting sick and tired of this.
And just the comments have been one after another of people being frustrated and fed up with the fact that there is nothing new.
This is all just spinning wheels.
And if there’s nothing there to prove anything, why are they bothering spitting this out?
And I think we’ve covered exactly why they’re bothering.
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, if I wanted to prove I was doing work in my IT job, I could produce a lot of logs.
But, you know, if I don’t provide any analysis or filtering, that’s just garbage is what that is.
Yeah, it sounded like another pun that you had there.
i don’t even know what you’re talking about well thank you matt for reading this so that we don’t have to indeed so yeah you don’t want to if i let me be blunt again we say it all the time but i believe i speak for all of us when i say we would love for there to be proof that we’re being visited by other intelligences that would be great honestly these days any intelligence be lovely
But yeah, I don’t fear that stuff at all.
I’m not afraid of it.
I wish it were true.
But I need harder evidence.
And I don’t need volume and equality.
You need compounding.
Ice cream that doesn’t lick itself.
That’s right.
Because then I don’t want to lick it.
Anyway.
All right.
Thank you, Matt and Karen, for pulling this together.
And I’ll put links to this data if you want to go look at it yourself or lick at it if it is an ice cream cone.
Right, right.
Yeah.
I’m ready for lunch now.
There’ll be licks.
I mean, links in the show notes.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard Matt Baxter and your regular hosts digging into the latest tranche of UAP documents.
Tranche, by the way, if you’re wondering, is just a fancy word for a batch or a slice, a portion of a bigger stack.
Anyway, this latest tranche, there’s a link to it in the show notes if you want to go through them yourself.
And that right there is why this episode, like every episode where we wade into the topic of UAPs or UFOs, stalls out when it’s time to write and record the intro and outro.
I’m still working through what all this means to me and what can be safely deciphered from the publicly available facts about the people behind these agencies, the legislations, and all these hearings.
Here’s the thing about document drops like this one.
Even the release of information can be timed, filtered, framed, or aimed at a particular outcome.
The motives of the people involved vary.
So do the desires of the constituents who vote for these politicians and fund their campaigns.
And underneath it all, you’ve still got that core group tied to the old Bigelow team.
The people behind NIDS and Skinwalker Ranch.
And then you’ve got a separate crowd tied to TV shows and media companies.
And some of these folks are pandering to an audience that wants disclosure the way certain evangelicals want trumpet blasts and teleporting rapture.
Some want the government to officially endorse alien intelligences and an imprimatur to go investigate poltergeists on the taxpayer’s dime.
And maybe that should stop you cold, because they already did exactly that.
The old Bigelow Link program, AAWSAP, spent around $22 million in taxpayer dollars studying the paranormal happenings at Skinwalker Ranch.
So this isn’t some hypothetical I’m dreaming of.
It’s a rerun, and they’d like to make it official this time.
And some want the whole thing as a distraction.
And some just want it to be true so badly that every hearing and every release video feels like a wink from the secret keepers and a signal that their belief was right all along.
So this was never one thing.
And all these motives and probably plenty more are actively driving the changes.
The new agency names, the shifting adjectives for whatever it is we’re supposedly investigating.
And then there’s the strangest new word in the whole bunch, resolution.
As if you could tie a bow on any of this stuff and call it solved.
My point’s simple.
There was never one answer to these mysteries because there never was one thing going on.
And I’m honestly worried that this decades-long influence campaign from Mr. Bigelow and his network of media and researchers has finally hit a tipping point.
They’ve bootstrapped themselves onto a durable and deeply misleading impression that all of this stuff is real and dangerous and not of this earth, when there is nothing in the materials and reports now or ever…
that would justify that conclusion scientifically.
So yes, critical thinking and evidence analysis are still the best way to evaluate this kind of stuff, as long as it’s being evaluated honestly.
But when the research is steered by an agenda, whether that’s a worldview, or money, or politics, or a little bit from every column, that doesn’t bring us closer to disclosure of a hidden truth, it just sinks us deeper into the fog of mystery.
I’m not claiming to have the answer myself.
I’m just claiming that now more than ever, critical thinking and scientific skepticism are the best tools we have for evaluating and testing the evidence.
But document drops like these don’t make anything clearer.
They hand us one more layer of engagement that needs its own skeptical interrogation.
There’s no victory conditions in this stuff.
It’s a chore.
And the best help I can offer is that chores are easier when you’ve got good tools and lots of practice.
So I hope that we’re helping.
And I hope we can always find some fun and some joy in this work because the thought that it might never end can be overwhelming.
Monster Talk’s theme music is by Pete Stealing Monkeys.
At least this week we found out how much people needed a new cryptid in their lives.
So way to go, Jimothy!
This has been a Monster House presentation.

The post 🛸 S05E41 – Government Disclosure appeared first on MonsterTalk.

View Details

Content Warning: This episode contains frank discussion of animal death, carcass predation, and graphic descriptions of animal mutilation. Listener discretion is advised.

Blake and Karen continue their conversation with religious studies scholar Lee Weiss on the cattle mutilation mystery. If you missed part one, wind your podcast player back an episode – this one picks up right where the panic peaked. At the center of part two is Emmy Award-winning reporter Linda Moulton Howe, whose 1980 documentary A Strange Harvest wrapped a decade of dead cows, black helicopters, and hypnotic regressions into a single package and delivered it to America.

Lee walks through what happened next: the government’s Rommel Report and its verdict of “Mother Nature,” the tragic Bennewitz affair, cow parts arriving by mail in Alberta, a declassified CIA remote-viewing file, and how the whole phenomenon finally hardened into alien orthodoxy. It all ends with the big question – what’s actually killing these animals?

Episode LinksA Strange Harvest (1980)– watch a pristine copy of Linda Moulton Howe’s documentary on Archive.org, along with its 1993 sequel Strange Harvests
Linda Moulton Howe– the Emmy Award-winning Denver reporter who became “the dead cow lady”
Cattle Mutilation– Wikipedia’s overview, including details of the Rommel Report (Operation Animal Mutilation, 1980)
The FBI’s Animal Mutilation Files– the declassified records that first drew Lee into this topic
Paul Bennewitz– the businessman at the center of a genuine government disinformation campaign (a future MonsterTalk episode, Blake promises)
The Gold Key comics version of the ‘Snippy’ storyvia Archive.org
Dulce Base– the legendary underground alien base of northern New Mexico
Senator Harrison Schmitt– the astronaut-senator who convened the 1979 Albuquerque conference on the mutilations
Ed Sanders– the beat writer and Manson family chronicler who penned one of the first major mutilation articles
R. Leo Sprinkle– the University of Wyoming psychologist whose hypnotic regression appears in A Strange Harvest (papers held at UW’s American Heritage Center)
Bill Cooper– the Pale Horse conspiracist Howe crossed paths with
Art Bell– whose Bigelow-sponsored Area 2000 featured Howe’s segments before Coast to Coast AM
Robert BigelowandNIDS– whose 1990s investigations included the prion disease conspiracy theory
The Stargate Project– the CIA remote-viewing program whose Sunstreak files contained Lee’s strangest find
Endangered Species (1982)– the mainstream movie cash-in that nobody on the panel recommends
Procedures for Evaluating Predation on Livestock and Wildlife– the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension manual Lee recommends to anyone serious about the topic

The Ick-o-Meter: A Strange Harvest (1980)The Ick-o-MeterQuantifying the gross in Linda Moulton Howe’s A Strange Harvest (1980) · a MonsterTalk investigation · hover over any bar for details

Total icky hits316 Ick density4.3% of words “Mutilation” rate1 per 52 secIcky terms and concepts, rankedIck over time (hits per 5-minute segment)Method: full transcript (7,285 words, ~57 min) parsed by caption; exact word and phrase matching per category. The “body part removed / missing” concept counts “removed,” “missing,” “gone,” or “taken” only when a body part appears in the same caption, to exclude phrases like “mutilations had gone away.” Compiled for MonsterTalk S05E39-40, “Strange Harvest: The Cattle Mutilation Mystery.”

Crowdsourcing CornerLee is looking for leads on Project Sunstreak – the CIA remote-viewing subproject whose declassified files inexplicably involve images of mutilated cattle – along with any other cattle mutilation ephemera, and an introduction to Linda Moulton Howe if you can manage one. Reach him here: (laweiss1991@gmail.com).

About Our GuestLee Weiss is a religious studies scholar researching mass paranormal and psychogenic events, including the cattle mutilation phenomenon and its religious dimensions.

Lee Weiss on Academia.edu
Of Gods and Monsters Conference (2019)– where Blake and Lee first met
Gods and Monsters 2 (2026)– where they renewed the acquaintance
Religion, Culture, and the Monstrous– the academic volume featuring contributions from both Blake and Lee

Check out Lee’s writing at his Substack

PromotionsCheck out Karen’s bookBeyond Words.

SEO TranscriptThis is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

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It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant, hairy creature.
Part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24 mile long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland.
It’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
This is part two of our look at cattle mutilations with religious studies scholar Lee Weiss.
I would recommend checking out part one if you missed it, since we’re continuing a conversation and you’ll be joining in medias res.
Pretty much just like the Odyssey in that respect.
I mean, the poem, not the movie.
Well, I mean, I say not the movie.
I haven’t seen the movie.
But look, can we just get on with this intro?
I didn’t want to sidetrack our discussion, but we briefly talk about UFO comics in this episode, and two of my most vivid 1970s weird shit moments are watching Jack Webb’s produced TV show Project UFO and buying one of these gold key UFO comics off the black metal spinning comic book rack at the drugstore next to my pediatrician’s office.
When I recently discovered that these Gold Key comics are available on the Internet Archive, I had to go look that issue up and was delighted to see that my recollections about the content match the actual book.
We do talk a lot about how fallible human memory is, but sometimes it can be rewardingly accurate.
And the older I get, the more pleased I am when any of the dusty garbage in my head turns out to be based on a true story.
The point is that you’ll find a link to those comics in the show notes along with links to Emmy award-winning Linda Moulton Howell’s documentary Strange Harvest.
I know skeptics and believers won’t always agree on what’s behind these stories, but at least we’re able to go review the same source material for how these ideas propagated out into the wider world back in ye olde groovy disco days.
And this series sure would be improved by a follow-up deep dive into taphonomy, wouldn’t it?
Because skeptics will tell you that every one of these dead animals had its own cause, it’s better if we do take a little trip down to Funimilane soon and learn how various factors change the forms of animals when they die.
Whether it’s predators or humans or disease or accidents, what happens next is fascinating and follows some predictable patterns.
This has led to insights useful in forensics, and some of these patterns are so predictable that they become evidence suitable for helping determine guilt or innocence in court cases.
It’s nasty and disgusting and also fascinating, which sounds a bit like how my wife describes me, but that’s a different story.
Besides, as useful a tool as it is for helping skeptics win arguments, these wounds were not caused by Occam’s razor.
Monster Talk.
We’re joined again by Lee Weiss this week, and we’re discussing animal mutilations.
If you haven’t heard part one, you need to get back into your podcast and wind back to last week and get part one.
But one person hits the scene, and I think she manages to take one hour of television and stick all of this candy into one beautiful big wrapper, which I admit I knew about for decades, but only watched…
uh last night in preparation for this show i finally sat down and watched the whole thing uh for listeners there’ll be a link in the show notes there is a beautiful pristine copy of this film on archive.org you can download and watch or just watch streaming um i’m not gonna say it is the height of journalism but um after this film she does become not linda moulton howe but emmy award-winning linda moulton howe linda moulton how emmy award-winning uh
Well, reporter, I guess.
Linda, how should I introduce you?
I always lose track.
Emmy-winning, I know you’ve done documentaries, right?
Or maybe an Emmy award-winning TV producer and author.
But all of that’s so hard to say.
So all of that, Linda Howe.
Of course, Emmy award-winning Linda Howe coming up here in just a few moments.
Usual Linda Moulton Howe, investigator, Emmy award-winning documentary producer.
and general scientific reporter for this program.
Linda Moulton Howe, Emmy Award-winning documentary producer, investigator of crop circles and animal mutilation.
The documentary Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist looking into crop circles, animal mutilations, and stuff going on in Puerto Rico.
Linda Howe, who is…
an investigative journalist actually emmy award-winning producer linda howe is an emmy award-winning television producer writer and researcher of earth mysteries linked to non-human intelligences we’re talking about strange harvest can you can you tell us a little bit about this film i it’s
Yes.
I rewatched it recently, too, and it holds up.
I know you’re familiar with In Search Of.
Did someone say In Search Of?
If you loved In Search Of, you should check out another fine Monster House production, In Research Of, with myself, Blake Smith, and Dr. Jeb Card.
In Research Of, we’ll talk and have some fun.
We share ideas, but not the only ones.
We’ll share the facts that we show sometimes last.
I.R.O.
In each episode, we take a 22-minute episode of In Search Of and add information that the producers didn’t or couldn’t include.
Check TV listings in your podcast market.
It’s got these beautiful 70s.
I mean, it’s 1980, but it’s still got these beautiful 70s vibes.
And it’s kind of where what becomes now, I think, effectively the orthodox explanation for the cattle mutilation phenomena becomes crystallized.
Now, really, before this, it had all, I mean, again, we talked about this since Snippy, it had been associated with aliens.
And by 76, the Snippy story is popularly associated with UFOs in…
comic books for children.
The illustrations are great.
Some of the images in this comic book are just, I mean, they’re astonishing.
And they do cover all of these true UFO stories from the golden age of UFOs with these just beautiful, like, Silver Age comic illustrations.
And you get to see the horse get zapped just in eight different issues.
But while it had always been this kind of, one of the theories, there’s still this skepticism, like,
The early investigators are still trying, the 70s investigators are still promoting a vision of, well, it could be a government conspiracy.
It could be something else.
It could be the satanic cults.
The satanic cult theory goes throughout the 70s.
And there’s a lot of tangentially, there are better…
you know, agent to mutilate cattle ostensibly than UFOs on first glance, when you have like the Night Stalker going around, when you have the, one of the first great like articles on the cattle mutilation phenomena is by Ed Sanders, who was this beat writer who also wrote the first book on the Manson family.
And according to him, he got involved with this after writing his Manson family book and getting a tongue, a cow tongue mailed to him in the mail.
There’s a very strange account out of Canada in 1992.
This is just a side note, I’m sorry.
I’m just wondering if they lick the stamp themselves or use the cow tongue.
Sounds like voodoo to me.
A little bit, it’s odd.
But in 1992 in Edmonton, a number of residents of this town called Legal
received a series of cow parts in the mail over the course of a number of days so they just open up their mailboxes there’d be parts of cows in there cow tongues cow eyes something that came up but to circle back around to kind of what her documentary really does
These strands of both conspiratorial thinking and UFO thinking, that the cause of this is either space aliens or some kind of conspiracy, they’d been in the community a long time, but there was still this attempt through the 70s, most of the investigators are trying to at least…
They all have their pet theories, and I think secretly most of them at the time really believed it was aliens from the beginning.
Gabe Valdez, I don’t think, did.
I think some of them really thought it was this…
Some military conspiracy or another.
Emmy award-winning TV producer and author.
Linda Moulton Howe, in her documentary… Emmy award-winning Linda Moulton Howe.
Emmy award-winning.
Emmy award-winning.
Who won’t return my emails.
Oh, no.
I’ll send her another one.
In this… She basically… And this goes out of…
It goes…
It is a like cult classic on cable television.
It gets like, I don’t know if it’s syndicated with documentaries, but it’s circulated quite regularly to the point that she updates it in the early 90s.
But it fuses these dimensions of there’s a government conspiracy and then also there’s this alien conspiracy.
She becomes quite fixated on this later on.
And I don’t know if we want to get into the Benowitz stuff or just kind of like simmer with the birth of the alien conspiracy.
The senator has this conference to kind of bring attention to this and invites both federal law enforcement people and also the nascent cattle mutilation investigation community.
And this is ostensibly where Benowitz gets brought into this scheme.
In our first episode, Lee, you were talking about copycat cases of this.
And I’m wondering when Strange Harvest came out, what effect this had on the spread of not only the belief in this, but also the phenomenon taking place.
So did this increase the amount of cases that were seen?
It’s an odd thing.
You would expect it to, but it doesn’t.
After, so her report comes out at the same time that this thing called her report, her documentary, comes out at the same time that the Ronald report comes out.
So this FBI agent, or at this point he was retired from the FBI, but he’s appointed to head this federal investigation into this.
Now, by this point, the FBI hadn’t been investigating this since 1976.
Not very extensively going by their records, which is how I initially got involved with this.
And all of the FBI’s records on cattle mutilation are readily available also on archives.org.
The Rommel Report interviews all these people and effectively concludes, no, it’s all natural causes.
It does weirdly highlight a number of cases that it says, well, this is anomalous, we can’t explain this, but then it doesn’t expand on that.
even though the cases don’t seem, it’s odd.
The whole thing is very odd.
And one does get the impression the federal government really is just trying to sweep it under the rug, which makes sense given the background and that it just is kind of annoying, like you can’t explain it.
But after 1980, the cases do drop off.
Now, there are still isolated accounts.
And these periodic breakouts.
And weirdly enough, right now, there’s a huge outbreak that’s been going on for years in Texas.
There’s, I think, another in New Mexico.
So they still reoccur post-1980.
But after the 70s, and particularly 75 and 76, it’s like, I mean, it gets so bad that they’re shooting at helicopters.
And like the…
like people are forming posses.
Wow.
It doesn’t ever get back to that point.
After 1980, the phenomena kind of… And what happens, I think… Emmy award-winning TV producer and author.
Linda Moulton Howe has some…
I love that.
I just say her whole name every time I reference her.
Yeah, one of those names.
For some reason, it is.
For real, yeah.
Well, I mean, she always, you know, on the Art Bell shows.
By the way, Art Bell before, if you go back to our archives, you can find after he passed, I did a tribute episode.
But before he did Coast to Coast, he did a show called Area 2000, which was entirely sponsored by Robert Bigelow.
And that show…
Emmy award winning TV producer and author.
Linda Moulton Howell already doing regular segments, very reminiscent of what became her Earth Files.
So that whole formula was there as a way.
And I didn’t really understand exactly what she was doing in the sense that she was a local reporter.
She did.
She got an Emmy for doing this coverage of this story.
And then that became her life.
Like her life became reporting on these strange things.
Like she didn’t go on to cover traffic reports or local political corruption.
Right.
No, it’s like she became the dead cow lady.
Right.
So.
she gets sucked straight into it um and again i think it’s something that hap similar would happen to benowitz it’s the same guy that they’re interacting with and i mean she was also interacting with i’m not gonna get in i’m not a my background is not in ufos but um like she was interacting with uh bill cooper before his death um so she i think she they get to her i think
The dead horse meets the pale horse.
I got it.
It’s quite an apropos.
She seems a lot less anti-Semitic than he was.
Thankfully, yeah.
Yeah, in her favor.
So I think one thing that happens with this documentary, and because at this point the cases are receding, people are reporting on them less.
And it really fully shifts just completely into the ETH, the alien hypothesis, and specifically the alien conspiracy sort of branch.
You don’t really, with one odd exception that I’ll talk about more a little bit later, Bigelow’s NIDS, they…
Because they also do a lot of cattle investigations in the 90s.
One of their teams really, really took seriously the medical conspiracy, like governments, like FDA, military, covering up a prion disease outbreak theory.
They had maps and graphs, and they have this whole claim that Alzheimer’s rates are being misreported.
but which is true.
And that what this is covering up is a wide scale outbreak of prion disease in the beef supply.
It’s a great conspiracy, right?
I mean, but it’s a really good one.
Yeah.
And in the UK, they were terrified of it and we didn’t want it to happen here.
So everybody, it just like, okay.
Oh no.
Another outbreak of Ebola has happened in Africa.
We’re like, oh, that’s terrible.
Is it coming here?
Because we matter, right?
Like that’s, it always comes back to, is it about us?
Is it about us?
Is it about us?
Fear.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So when I watched Strange Harvest last night, I was surprised.
I’m a little curious.
I was talking to Karen before the show.
It’s 57 minutes long.
And I didn’t know if it was originally a 90-minute documentary or if it was an hour, but they’ve extended it just a little bit to make it into a VHS or something.
So I wasn’t quite clear on that.
It was made for TV, and then she extends it with more footage later.
Okay, that fits.
I think in 88, the longer version, and then 93 is the sequel, which is Strange Harvests, which I still haven’t watched yet, but I just found out about it a few minutes ago.
Since our recording, I found a little more about the history of the documentaries we’re discussing.
It’s because there’s more than one Strange Harvest out there, and it gets confusing fast.
The original is A Strange Harvest, singular.
It aired May 25, 1980 as a 90-minute evening special on KMGH-TV, Channel 7, Denver.
It pulled the largest audience in that station’s history for a locally produced documentary, and it won Linda Moulton Howe a regional Emmy the following year in 1981.
Now, the version most people watch today, including the copy up on the Internet Archive, is not that original broadcast.
It’s a shorter reissue, running about 57 minutes, with new Howe narration bolted onto the front that references cattle mutilations as late as 1982.
It circulated on home video as you’ll see it dated to 1988 in some catalog listings.
And then, 13 years after the original, there’s a sequel, Strange Harvests, plural, with that S on the end.
That one came out in 1993.
It’s about an hour long and it revisits the same territory, animals still dying, light still in the sky.
It’s a separate film and it’s the one that trails off into the full alien conclusion.
So,
A Strange Harvest 1980 Emmy Award winner.
It’s recut home edition.
And then Strange Harvest, 1993, the follow-up.
Same story, three different packages.
And then to make it even more confusing, in 2024, a new film called Strange Harvest hit the indie film circuit.
You’ll see that one referred to as a mockumentary, but to be clear, it’s a horror film, not a comedy, so maybe pseudo-documentary is a less ambiguous label.
Anyway, it has nothing to do with animal mutilations.
It’s about a serial killer called Mr.
Shiny, and most importantly for our purposes,
is not related to the topic we’re discussing but in the end of that episode i was shocked to see leo sprinkle show up doing a hypnosis and a hypnotic regression now leo sprinkle if ufo people will know him as being a hypnotic regression uh ufo investigator from way back uh also from the colorado area karen and he was also involved sorry yeah he was also involved with stan roman x early from here yeah
So but they’re doing this again, just like on in search of they’re doing like it’s a dark room with brown walnut paneling.
And they’re asking this woman to recall these memories.
They’re quite traumatic.
I mean, it is it.
You know, it.
an early Cronenberg movie.
It looks like The Brood or Shivers.
In more ways than one.
There’s a guy in Scanners who looks a lot like Leo Sprinkle, but…
the the what surprised me was it starts out as a pretty straight documentary and then by the end of the thing it’s well this is either a government conspiracy or it’s aliens those are really the only two explanations that make any sense both yeah or both right or the governments are colluding with the aliens you know so right so
For her to have kept this same story going and the story itself to have evolved so little is surprising.
It’s almost like it rolled into its canonical version and just stuck, right?
So in a sense, I’m wondering if Strange Harvest sort of forms part of the canonical literature of the field.
I think so.
I think, and I think that’s the transition from, in the 70s, you really get some out there theories about what’s going on.
I mean, you get like new agers writing into Stigmata and proposing, well,
One really good one is that this is a mass, what’s the topa or a thought form that’s being manifested by the collective anxiety of the human race.
And what’s specifically…
the collective anxiety of America vis-a-vis the Soviet Union and the war.
And that it’s first preying on the cattle and that next it’s going to trigger some mass psychic event that will kill all of humanity.
It gets related to also like Soviet psychological operations.
I do have an odd digression
if any of your listeners want to help me with this.
Oh, crowdsourcing.
We love crowdsourcing.
While I was looking into the FBI files on this, I thought I would look into the declassified CIA files.
Do you know what Project Sunstreak is?
I do not.
Project Stargate?
I do know Project Stargate.
So it’s a subsidiary of that and had to deal with remote viewing.
Okay.
So it’s…
a little redacted.
It’s like one of their usual remote viewing reports.
The odd thing is that it seems to involve using images of mutilated cattle as an attempt to interfere with or block the remote viewer’s capabilities.
And it seems to imply that this could be used as defense against potential Soviet psychic spies that, well, perhaps we could use the American, like they would just, and it’s very, I don’t, again, it’s quite redacted.
Wait, like pictures of dead cows would block Soviet psychic spies?
That’s utter nonsense.
Oh, that’s a good one.
fitting that’s three now and what’s even stranger is for some reason they include in the declassified document this clipping about cattle mutilation reporting oh wow which and i and i’ve no there’s no reference in the it’s a very brief document none of the other ones
In case any of your listeners are believers in the government conspiracy, just to give them some more fuel.
What would they, what are you looking for?
And where would you like them to send information if they have the information to provide?
Up to that.
Oh, yeah.
I’ll put it at the end of the show.
I’ll put it in the show notes.
And if you have anything to contribute here or leads or just, you know.
Or any cattle mutilation.
Blassy pictures of dead cows, whatever.
If you can get me in touch with Linda, anything.
yeah that sounds good yeah we have one more pop culture thing i guess we should at least mention so we don’t get angry letters uh there was a mainstream movie about uh ostensibly ostensibly about cattle mutilations uh which is endangered species in 1982 if they aren’t stopped now there may be no hope for the future
Endangered species.
It’s not science fiction anymore.
I didn’t care for it.
It’s a dreadful movie.
Not even so bad as good.
It was just really not great.
Not really, no.
Definitely not.
It’s really, it’s also a strange mishmash.
It’s clearly like an odd cash-in, kind of late, like a late cash-in.
I think it’s more inspired by just like the sci-fi trend in late 70s, early 80s, like cinema.
And then there’s this like…
spoiler alert if anyone is planning on watching the movie.
Don’t.
Don’t.
I won’t.
The ending is that the government is conducting, I mean, it’s effectively the Valdez hypothesis, but the government is conducting secret tests and then they’re utilizing cattle in these tests.
Which is interesting.
So you see that even like up until like the 80s, the full like panoply of theories are still out there.
And some of them are still out there, like the satanic abuse theories and the ritual violence theories and the cult theories.
Those are still out there.
And ultimately those have the most quote unquote weight in terms of evidence.
people investigating it, I guess.
But the government theory outside of, you know, the alien, either that they’re at war with the aliens in an underground base, if you follow with like the…
Dolce.
Do you have more to say about Dolce?
I’m not the person to talk to about it.
But, I mean, it’s interesting that this phenomenon seems to touch, like, every inch of the American, like, paranormal landscape.
It touches almost every major, like, that’s why the Kennedy assassination.
It touches all of these major alien conspiracies, abduction conspiracies.
It’s basically barbecuing on.
well unfortunately we’ll need to start to wrap things up but uh i think we need to ask the big question what’s going on here what what is really behind all of this which we’ve touched upon
What’s actually happening?
Again, there are some strange outlier cases.
What’s actually happening to the cows, I think, is just a series of mostly natural events.
And I think anyone who is very serious about cattle mutilation, the two things they need to look at are…
There’s a great book that AgriLife Extension put out, Procedures for Evaluating Predation on Livestock and Wildlife.
That’s handy.
That’s a great title.
Yeah, it’s very easy to remember.
But it’s this manual for ranchers that just shows here are the usual signs of predation.
Now, I think what’s happening in the cases that get people really freaked out initially that start the outbreaks, people are stumbling upon animals that…
have a series of a series of different natural wounds that have for whatever reason either dried unusually there’s weather perhaps there’s predation after an initial predation so
coyotes get to something then cows cows then crows get to something so you could stumble across an animal that has its genitals ripped open but then also a single eye plucked out and you would think well coyotes don’t pluck out a single eye you could also stumble upon this animal three days later after ants had eaten it and after there had been some certain weather phenomena and then not only does it have these initial two unusual wounds but then it’s also got
strange sort of drawings of these patterns of predation that you have.
So you stack all this together.
Then when you combine that with…
any social or cultural phenomena that are occurring, or the fact that everyone, well, everyone, people really don’t seem to talk about counting anymore, but people in the know might mention it to you.
And then suddenly this story begins to exist.
I had a conception of what this looked like, but these stories wrecked them.
I think that’s the best one yet.
Let’s hope it’s a laugh.
Oh, we’re definitely going to have to wrap things up.
All right.
Well, okay.
So Lee, you’re our first time guest here.
So when people come on for the first time, besides harassing them with puns, we always like to ask this signature closing question, which is what is your favorite monster?
I spent the most time with the Yeti.
So not him.
Mothman is too simple.
Where me go one, me go all, right?
Oh, it’s trailing off now.
There are some really surreal monsters you find in early Chinese and Tibetan medical documents.
So you get stuff that’s just like a caterpillar with eight human legs and ears but no eyes or something that’s just like a ball covered in mouths.
I think those, at this point in my life, those are my favorites.
I realize those are not Japanese, but so many anime monsters seem to be akin to that.
I think there’s a through line of inspiration of these surreal, much more interesting than just big, hairy monsters.
Indeed.
If I did meet a Yeti, I would at least be able to ask them why they’re…
what they have to do with these UFOs and why they’re eating all of our cows’ rectums.
A fair question.
Please do.
Well, Lee, I can’t believe we’ve been doing the show this long and never really tackled this topic.
Oh, yeah, I know.
I appreciate you.
We asked you to really try to eat a giant dead elephant, and I think we’ve taken some really solid bites here.
So what are you going to do with your research?
You still thinking about what to do with it?
I am.
So initially it began as a broader topic looking at how paranormal phenomenon, particularly mass paranormal psychogenic events like these, induce religious experiences and spiritual experiences.
Initially, I was thinking about doing an academic paper, but I’ve kind of sworn off of those.
I’m done with them.
I’m not totally sure what is going to become of this.
I have a couple of little just short summaries of the more interesting cases I found.
Ones that focus on, again, like the weird monsters, the ones that focus on comparisons to horse ripping, similar phenomena in Europe and internationally.
But yeah, again, and if anyone is interested in a…
bunch of odd stories about dead animals, they can feel free to let me know.
I think this would make a great book.
I do too.
I really do.
But I would never, struggling through my own and watching Kieran go through hers, I wouldn’t wish that on anybody, but I think it can be good.
Well, I hope you do something with it because it seems like you’ve done a lot of work and I’m really pleased about that.
I love it when anybody goes to the trouble of just pulling together all this work.
You get your Mike Dash’s, your Robert Bartholomew type people doing this kind of stuff.
So that’s really great.
I think you’re a good company.
Fantastic.
Thank you guys so much again for having me.
I really appreciate it.
Really interesting stuff.
I have to keep in touch and bring you back on again.
Indeed.
Thank you so much.
Have a good night.
Thank you, Lee.
Hey, you too, guys.
Thanks again.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
Well, that was part two of our look at the phenomena of animal mutilations with religious studies scholar Lee Weiss.
Check out the show notes for links to Lee’s work as well as his contact information if you want to help him with his search for more information about animal mutilations or with contacting Linda, I mean, MA award-winning television producer Linda Moulton Howe.
Oh, and check out the show notes for one more thing.
I asked Lee for an example of the kinds of monster he was talking about when he did his favorite monster pic.
He sent me a link to the Hun Dun, a strange creature from China with six legs, no head or face, and four wings.
And I didn’t remember ever seeing such a thing before, but I have.
There’s a delightful animated one in the Marvel movie Shang-Chi that’s hanging out with Ben Kingsley’s Trevor Slattery character.
What is that?
Oh, who?
You can see Morris.
Morris?
Oh, Morris.
They can see you.
You’re real.
All this time I thought I was hallucinating him.
Where’s his face?
He’s a bit sensitive about that.
And I enjoyed the heck out of that film, but it was so full of amazing imagery that poor Morris the Hundun has fallen out of my recollections.
It reminds me a bit of the old story about the city fella who found himself driving a country road out in the sticks when he was passed by a four-legged chicken.
When he saw the chicken run into a farm, he pulled in after it and asked the farmer what’s going on.
The farmer told him it was an experimental chicken with four legs they were trying out to see if they could get more legs per bird.
Oh, how do they taste, said the city fella.
We don’t know, said the farmer.
We’ve never caught one.
Monster Talk theme music is by Pete Stealing Monkeys.
I wonder if amateur researchers waiting around to see what comes to eat dead cattle count as some kind of a stakeout.
This has been a Monster House presentation.

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View Details

Content Warning: This episode contains detailed discussion of animal injuries and death. Both parts carry an explicit tag.

Blake and Karen welcome Lee Weiss, a religious studies scholar whose deep dive into the FBI’s declassified cattle mutilation files grew into a sweeping study of one of America’s strangest panics. Blake first met Lee at the Of Gods and Monsters conference in 2019, and the two reconnected at its 2026 sequel – both contributed to the academic volume Religion, Culture, and the Monstrous. (affiliate link)

In part one of this two-part investigation, Lee lays out the anatomy of the “classic mute” – the missing eyes, ears, and soft tissue, the reportedly bloodless wounds, the absent tracks – and traces the phenomenon back to its 1967 case zero: Snippy the horse, found dead in Colorado’s San Luis Valley. From Victorian sheep panics and escaped menagerie cats to the economic collapse of the 1970s American rancher, the picture that emerges is far stranger than dead livestock. And that’s before the unmarked helicopters show up.

Part two lands next week.

Key Topics & Themes The “Classical Mutilation” Profile : Missing soft tissues often include genitals, eyes (especially the left), ears, tail, lower jaw flesh, tongue, and rectum. * Scene Anomalies: There is often an absent or anomalous amount of blood at the scene, including claims of “drained” carcasses or blood that is dried “like sand.” * Physical Evidence Claims: Alleged laser-like or cauterized wound edges are a recurring claim not supported by forensic examination. * Mysterious Circumstances: Scenes reportedly feature no tracks — of predators, humans, or even the animal itself — and a conspicuous scavenger and predator avoidance of carcasses. * Concomitant Phenomena : Mutilation flaps are frequently accompanied by UFO sightings, monster sightings (like dog-men), unmarked helicopters, and community-wide psychological contagion. * The 1967 “Case Zero” : The Snippy / Lady case in the San Luis Valley, CO, was the first case explicitly linked to UFO speculation in mass media, despite the local sheriff initially attributing the death to a lightning strike. There is also frequent naming confusion, as the horse’s real name was Lady, while Snippy was her sire. * Historical Anchoring : Claims often reference Victorian England and France livestock panics (and wealthy menagerie-escape theories) or King James’s Demonology (1606). The hosts note that this backward extension of history lends false credibility to contemporary panics. * The 1970s Mutilation Wave : The panic coincided with struggling small ranchers, Nixon’s grain deal with the USSR, and growing anti-government sentiment in rural America during the Vietnam era. A mass rancher cattle kill as a protest act occurred around 1973–74. * Conspiracy Theories : Explanations ranged from government mad cow disease surveillance to Operation Plowshare nuclear detonations, Satanic cults, military psyops mirroring Vietnam tactics, and alien harvesting. * Skeptical Counter-Explanations :* Post-mortem taphonomic processes (scavengers, insects, bloat) and reporting bias among ranchers primed by media coverage account for the phenomena naturally. The federally funded Rommel Report (1979–80) concluded the deaths were predominantly natural.

Episode LinksCattle Mutilation– Wikipedia’s overview of the phenomenon, its history, and investigations
The Mutilation of “Snippy” the Horse– the 1967 Alamosa, Colorado case that started it all (the horse was actually named Lady – Snippy was her sire)
The Condon Committee– whose investigation of the Snippy case found no evidence of abnormal causes
Gabe Valdez– the New Mexico State Police officer who became the state’s best-known mutilation investigator
British Big Cats– the “alien big cat” phenomenon Blake compares to earlier livestock panics
Dr. Darren Naish– previous MonsterTalk guest referenced in the alien big cat discussion
Project Plowshare– the government program detonating nuclear devices for civilian purposes near several mutilation hotspots
The Mi-Go– the Lovecraftian fungi from Yuggoth – and also a complex term from Tibet, a subject our guest has studied deeply

About Our GuestLee Weiss is a religious studies scholar researching mass paranormal and psychogenic events, including the cattle mutilation phenomenon and its religious dimensions.

Lee Weiss on Academia.edu
Of Gods and Monsters Conference (2019) – where Blake and Lee first met
Gods and Monsters 2 (2026) – where they renewed the acquaintance
Religion, Culture, and the Monstrous – the academic volume featuring contributions from both Blake and Lee

PromotionsCheck out Karen’s bookBeyond Words.

CreditsMonsterTalk is hosted by Blake Smith and Dr. Karen Stollznow.

SEO TranscriptThis is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

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In September 1967, on the King Ranch in the San Luis Valley of Colorado, an Appaloosa mare called Snippy was found dead and stripped of flesh from the neck up.
Some said this was the work of flying saucers.
Who or whatever did it, no one knows.
Since that time, and perhaps even earlier in this century, thousands of cattle, horses, and other animals have been cut up in strange ways throughout the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, Panama, the Canary Islands, and possibly other South American and European countries.
Parts missing are usually an ear, an eye, the tongue, the lower jaw is stripped of all flesh, the sexual organs are cut out, the rectum is cored out, and in some cases, the blood is gone.
Adding to the mystery is lack of tracks or other evidence.
Mutilated cattle have been found on wet sand or rain-soaked ground with no tracks around them, not even their own.
Some people call it cattle mutilation.
Whatever it’s called, it’s a strange harvest.
It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24-mile-long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland, it’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
So this week we’re kicking off a two-part look at the very mysterious and icky world of animal mutilations.
That horrific and disturbing introductory clip was from a documentary hosted and put together by Emmy Award winning journalist Linda Moulton Howe.
We’ll hear much more about that film and its various versions next week in part two.
But the clip does a couple of things.
Firstly, it quickly and tidily summarizes what sorts of oddities people refer to when they talk about the weird shitology category animal mutilations.
second it justifies the warning up at the top and the explicit tag that we’re slapping on both parts because some people will find the talk of the damage done to these animals disturbing also since I’ve already put in the explicit warning I get to say weird shitology without beeping it out that saves time
Skeptical investigators will tell you what’s really going on in most of these cases is natural post-mortem taphonomic processes performed by predators, carrion feeders, insects, and other biologically mundane factors.
But while that may be statistically true, the really weird part, the part that gets the weird shitology seal of approval, is all the adjacent circumstances surrounding these cases.
It’s animals found in oddly inaccessible places, a lack of tracks, the appearance of strange lights, mysterious unmarked vehicles, or a reported lack of blood.
And we will discuss a lot of that stuff over the next two episodes.
But in the end…
All we can honestly say is that animal mutilations of the type we’re discussing have so many unusual features that we couldn’t cover it all in a single episode.
Or in a two-parter.
Honestly, even an encyclopedic book would be challenged to contain the amount of oddness, and a scholar trying to tackle such a thing would likely feel utterly lost.
But my friend and fellow researcher Lee Weiss is collecting and compiling.
He has been for a while, and even though he’s still in the data gathering phase of his research, I suspected he would do a great job of introducing this topic to you fellow monster talkers.
So that’s what we’re going to do for these next two episodes.
One more thing.
This is a disturbing topic, but I’ve had a few decades to get over it.
If by some chance this is your first experience with such mutilations, I think you’re in good hands with Lee.
But you might find some of my comments sound flippant.
I hope a little levity is appropriate to lighten what would otherwise be a rather dark and disturbing walk through history.
Not just the animal deaths, but the economic and political story around them.
It can be a lot to take in.
I come from a family of farmers and ranchers and blue-collar people who know the toughness of trying to make it as an independent business person in these risky but vital professions.
So I’m not making fun of them and I’m not making fun of the pain and suffering of the animals.
But take, just for example, the case of cattle mutilation in the extreme elevations of the Rocky Mountains around Colorado.
I could speak of those cases with empathy and compassion.
but I cannot walk away from all that wordplay, people.
The stakes are just too high.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to the show, Lee Weiss.
I met Lee for the first time at Gods and Monsters 1, although we recently met up again at Gods and Monsters 2, Eclectic Rougarou.
Rougarou.
Rougarou.
Rougarou.
But Lee was giving a talk about the me go or the me go, which I thought our Lovecraft fans out there will mean they know that you’re a fun guy.
So that’s my that’s my Call of Cthulhu joke.
All right.
So, yeah.
So we have to ask the question.
This is a big topic.
And as I told Lee last night, it’s like we have to ask the question, how do we eat?
An enormous dead elephant with its genitals and eyeballs already gone being harassed by unmarked helicopters all the while.
So, again, I think the answer is still one bite at a time.
But before we get out our forks and napkins, welcome, Lee.
Is there anything else you want to add about yourself?
Or did I nail most of it?
I think you got it.
I think the elephant comment particularly encapsulates what I’m about.
Excellent.
Oh, it’s a scary stop.
This is such a huge topic.
I guess not exactly monstrous, but definitely monster adjacent, which is territory that we’ve very happily embraced to keep the show going.
But I mean, this is a mystery that’s been with us effectively our whole lives.
And I guess what we should probably start with is figuring out what we’re talking about.
What are animal mutilations or cattle mutilations or livestock mutilations?
Because if you listen to the people reporting them, they’re not just dead animals.
There’s something going on.
What are we talking about today?
So I think the best way to start talking about it is to look at what is called in the community the classical mutilation.
And that has, depending on who you talk to, a variety of different signs.
Generally, and the most generally, but we’ll see, there’s an acceptance of pretty much every rule, like that this…
phenomena presents.
You’ll be missing genitals.
There will be missing eyes, particularly left eyes.
Ears will be gone.
Sometimes tails will be gone.
There will be either very clean cuts like wounds to the animal or odd jagged edges.
All of these things, and then you get even more novel phenomena, like people will claim that there’s no blood anywhere, whereas they would usually see blood with these, that the wounds don’t bleed, which ultimately is a fairly normal thing in a dead animal, but that there is a conspicuous lack of blood.
This accelerates the point of animals drained of blood, animals completely bloodless, or even the blood being dried off, like it’s present, but it’s almost like sand.
A really common claim later on becomes that these wounds are sealed with lasers, that they’re cauterized.
Then you get these kinds of…
dealing with the locale and the ways that they’re found, that there are no tracks around anywhere.
So not only that dogs and coyotes will seem to avoid them, or birds, but that the animal itself, generally a cow or a bull, sometimes a horse, rarely a lamb, very rarely a pig or something else, but there will be no tracks of that leading to the site where it was killed, which all of the authorities find very unusual.
So those are the normal traits of the individual act of the animal mutilation.
The larger and more interesting component of it is that once one person finds a dead mutilated animal,
many other people in the community will begin to.
And there are a number of, I think, very well-recorded cases where this happened almost simultaneously, where the two people did not communicate with each other or read any third party or talk to a police officer.
They both simply found these dead cows and…
both had an extreme reaction to it.
Now, in general, this occurs within a social context where people already knew about this more broadly, but it’s still unusual that they would both have this experience.
There’s also these concomitant phenomena of unusual aerial sightings.
It’s deeply tied in with UFOs, as we’ll talk extensively about.
But then you mentioned monsters.
It’s also tied in very closely with monster sightings.
Sheriff Valdez, Gabe Valdez, who’s one of the major figures in this, and Wolverton.
Also, I think Sheriff Wolverton or Captain Wolverton.
both of them in their books on this subject and they’re these major figures and these major like first-hand investigators these 70s incidences all of them devote a lot of time and attention to monster sightings that occur concomitantly within i don’t know to borrow like ufology terminology flaps of cattle mutilations or these these localized events these mass events
And yeah, people will start seeing UFOs and they’ll start seeing monsters.
And just like with the cattle mutilations, there’s one really odd case where two separate young girls in this, I believe it was Colwell, it’ll come up later.
Both of them see like dog men stalking through the night on the same night, but they didn’t like, I mean, it was a small town.
I’m sure they were, but they didn’t know each other.
So I’d say those are kind of the,
the features of what we’re talking about.
As we’ll talk about later, there’s a lot of different global phenomena of people finding dead animals and the community becoming almost irrationally afraid and then having…
psychogenic, religious, spiritual, whatever you…
These paranormal events surrounding it.
The cattle mutilation phenomenon in America, in North America, I think is unique in that it has this kind of…
It imagines that it has this very rigorous structure.
Well, these are the classic cattle mutilations, but… Well, I’d like to…
pop in and ask a couple of questions you’ve covered a lot of ground already uh but i’m just wondering uh why cattle i mean you’ve talked about other animals to pigs and horses uh but it seems to be
seems like the canonical thing is that the cattle mutilations and also where this is occurring.
So you’re saying this is worldwide.
I’m here, I’m in Colorado at the moment and I hear of a lot of cases here, but I don’t think I ever heard of any in Australia where I grew up, but presumably a lot of farming there, agriculture.
I suspect that there are probably some cases there too.
But yeah, if you could tell us a little bit about why cattle and where these are occurring mostly.
I’m so glad that you brought up Australia already because that is a really interesting side point of the whole phenomena.
But to get to the question, I’m not entirely sure.
I do have my suspicions.
I think it has to do with the way that cattle are raised, are ranched.
They’re…
unless they’re on a feed line, they’re often outside, particularly in the 60s through 70s and 80s in North America.
And also in Australia in the 30s and 40s, I’m not sure about now.
It is a lack of knowledge of mine.
these animals are outside all the time and sometimes the ranchers won’t see them for days on end and that will be normal.
So when the rancher discovers the cattle, it’s, you know, in an advanced state of mutilation if it’s died perhaps two days ago and has been preyed upon.
I suspect that’s the real reason.
Like if we were just, you know, a scientific explanation, I would say that’s what’s happening.
And vis-a-vis Australia, there’s this…
During the late 70s, early 80s, when there is this huge panic in North America.
one of the major international sources of confirmation that this is happening everywhere is Australia.
And there’s a lot of weird urban legends that come out of these zines and these cult publications surrounding it, by guys like Tom Adams, who we’ll talk about later.
There’s actually a fake movie, a fake silent movie.
find the name when we get into Australia later on but that I’ve seen in like lists of lost films but it’s I mean it’s not a real movie it’s allegedly about flying saucers abducting cattle in Australia and it’s linked to this like silent film director in Australia but it’s not real but there are a number of cattle mutilation
paddocks in Australia, but that seemed to be tied to ranching and cattle rustling and economic concerns as opposed to anything UFO related or government related.
Well, I don’t know where to begin because there’s so many elements to this, but I’m just wondering, where did this link to UFOs and to the government?
How did these connections?
begin to be these associations how were they made to to animals just dying and decomposing well please i was gonna say should we start with at some point like okay listeners will know i had sort of a pet peeve or
a bugbear or something around the idea that when a monster flap happens, somebody comes along and extends the history and anchors it in the past for sort of a credibility anchor.
So let’s just start with when the pop culture conception of this phenomenon happened.
Like, can we, can we talk about like what, I guess there is sort of a case zero, even though if, if the skeptics are right about what’s really going on, there’s no case zero because this has always been happening, but.
But what’s case zero for animal mutilations?
And let’s bring it from there, if that’s cool.
If that works for you, Karen.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
So 100%, it’s snippy.
Or I believe her real name was Lady.
Yeah, why the pseudonym?
Was she a dancer or something?
It’s a great question.
I thought you said Skippy.
We’re talking about Australia too, so.
It’s interesting that Snippy is the archetypal case because Snippy has almost nothing in common with the later cases.
Now, Snippy is the first kind of time…
It’s the first time where one of these events was viewed through a, let’s say, paranormal lens.
Because I found a number of much earlier accounts of like what I would still call like mass panics.
dealing with like um even in like in america and in france that goes back a long ways this one was quite early on tied in with ufo activity but even before then the family didn’t have any idea it was happening um snippy’s weird for a lot of reasons now so my understanding is snippy was her father the horse’s father and and again this is coming from it’s these accounts are so inaccurate
And a lot of them then are filtered through like UFO comic books, but this is for sure the first real like, it cements it in the cultural imagination.
But yeah, so Snippy is this horse, I believe her name was Lady, her father’s name was Snippy.
And the family finds her and it’s quite, it is quite striking and grotesque.
And it’s one of the ones that I’ve looked at where I actually have no idea what caused the injuries.
Like a lot of them, I’m very confident.
Like most of them, I’d say, you can explain this.
I mean, it’s weird.
And a lot of them, they’re very strange.
And I can see why people are freaked out by them.
But you can explain them.
This one is a little inexplicable.
The sheriff says she got hit by a bolt of lightning.
Karen, have you seen the snippy picture?
Yes, I have.
Okay, good.
So we’re all on the same page.
It is quite a striking image.
And I think that… A lightning striking image.
Oh, yeah.
Sorry, I love current events.
If we’re calling snippy case zero, and I agree with you, because after snippy, we start to see, and I’m sure we’ll get into the 1970s, what happens there.
But I’m wondering, before snippy…
This reminds me a little bit of some, they’re not moral panics, but they’re kind of a panic that happens sometimes where people decide that there’s a big cat out there.
There’s something, there’s some kind of predator out there and we’re going to have to hunt it, especially in the UK, where they’re going to hire…
trackers to track down because some sheep have died and there’s got to be an explanation and it’s got to be you know something unusual and do those cases kind of fit into this or have you looked at that or do or am i on it i’m on a side rail somewhere i think they’re very closely connected okay um and again so that’s i think when people post snippy and like post like the
All of the books that have like their introductions always will pre-snippy what was before the trying to, like you said, sort of create some broader history to it.
Historical anchoring, I think is how I call it.
And they always go to these…
Yeah, this Victorian, and there’s earlier accounts they find.
There’s one, I think, that in King James Demonology, he writes, this is like 1606.
Yeah, he goes back a piece, right?
He writes about sheep being massacred, but it’s so vague, you can’t really.
The ones that are the most similar to what…
We’re talking, and what we see even in the 30s and 40s are, and I think these people are finding it in, it’s in, I think, low or strange talents.
I’ll pick it up in a second.
The whole idea is you have these Victorian communities in England and France that are being terrified by, yeah, like these wolves, these weird beasts.
The weird thing about those is some of them later on get explained.
And I’m skeptical of even these explanations.
They get explained by like local noblemen who own these private zoos.
They were just these Victorian private zoos, and they would, like, lose ocelots.
It’s the wealthy menagerie.
Today we’re dealing with a classic menage.
Menage?
A menagerie.
Oh, it’s basically just a big-ass alien zoo full of aliens run by another alien.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Yes.
That comes up in the alien big cat community a lot.
And yeah, because there’s a number of cases where that’s, like, you have…
this strange creature stalking around in the woods and all of these sheep are mutilated in the communities and an uproar and then like you don’t hear about them two weeks later they like shoot a strange like some ant like animal from some guys but again i i don’t know i don’t know how how closely like how true that actually i mean the menagerie element is true and i’m sure that a bunch of animals escape from these menageries but
The connection does seem a little convenient to me.
Darren Nash has been on a few times.
We’ve discussed alien big cats, and it’s like there’s a plausible possibility that some surviving bodies of non-local large cats could exist in the UK.
It’s biologically plausible, and there seems to be some evidence for it.
But I think it’s probably overstated.
I would say…
In my estimation, the wealthy menagerie is kind of comparable to what in America we would call the derailed circus train.
Well, it’s a weird animal.
That’s not unusual, but it’s unusual that it would be here.
So therefore…
We have to have an explanation, and therefore the plausible explanation is a train derailed and let loose a collection of animals.
I cannot let this go.
I’m going to track down every record I can find of American circus train wrecks, because I just suspect there’s not very many, but it comes up as an explanation a lot.
Well, then we have the version in Australia of American soldiers bringing over these creatures.
indigenous also plausible that that really seems to have happened some but then to what extent do they survive and breed over a panther as a mascot or something like that yeah anyway
All right.
So I want to go to the 1970s where everything happens.
I was just a little guy in the 1970s.
I wasn’t old enough to to watch R-rated movies or read this sort of literature.
But meanwhile.
Across America, ranchers were getting quite upset because of what was going on with these animal mutilations and the government’s response.
So I guess we need to talk about that a little bit.
I don’t know how much we want to cover the economic, sociopolitical components of this.
Because you can get really into it.
And I don’t particularly want to.
It’s really…
quite tedious.
30 minutes later.
And if you look at this graph, you can see…
When it comes to choosing accounting software, there’s no accounting for taste.
That is effectively the situation.
But it is fascinating, and it really plays a major role in this.
Could we say that the American rancher was undergoing an extensive period of economic difficulty?
It was an extensive period of economic difficulty, absolutely.
But in addition to that, there’s also…
There’s this wheat deal that we make with the USSR, which is an attempt to kind of thaw relations.
It results in this halting of, as I understand it, the raising of the price.
Ultimately, this makes it incredibly difficult to raise cattle, particularly for small independent ranches, which were precipitously declining from the 50s to the 80s.
So there is this real economic
struggle that’s occurring um i think one thing that i’ve actually never seen it mentioned in any cattle mutilation literature i might be wrong about that but i’m pretty sure i’m right
In the same time, I believe it’s 73 or 74, there’s a mass protest of ranchers about the specific ramifications of this law because they can’t afford to feed their cattle.
So their cattle are too expensive effectively to sell.
So they bring out all of their cattle to this field, these hundreds of ranchers, and just kind of kill, like murder their cattle as an act of protest.
I don’t know if it’s murder, if it’s an animal.
It depends what you’re…
You’re a vegetarian or not.
Well, the Smiths say meat is murder, right?
Be loath to disagree with Morrissey.
So this was some sort of stakeout.
Oh, dear.
Linda McCartney said that first, but anyway.
Red Bull gives you wings.
Oh, she did?
Oh, I thought she was talking about stakeouts.
Okay, okay.
Sorry.
But so this is occurring at the same time that these cattle mutilation kind of outbreaks are happening and this social panic is happening.
There’s also a great deal of correlation between the kind of move that the Midwestern rancher makes away from kind of the mainstream politics of the 50s and 60s into a more libertarian skepticism of the federal government.
Again, largely because of Nixon’s economic policies.
This, I think, has a lot to do with the conspiratorial overtones and even the UFO overtones that the whole phenomena ultimately adopts.
So I think that’s an important kind of component.
I think we won’t get into…
the economic parameters of the wreck and the dual economic, but all of these things undergird what becomes this, I mean, it staged the scene for this kind of collective social pattern.
Yeah.
And so to sort of navigate this, you’ve got a culture and an important…
economic component of at least the united states because these ranchers are they’re big business right but they’re struggling and to some extent they’re blaming the government for their economic problems but now this mutilation flap happens so
How does it go?
Maybe you can give me this roadmap.
How does it go from angry ranchers in small communities to having like a big government response with hearings and papers being delivered?
How do we bridge that piece of the timeline?
How do we get to the government actually saying something’s going on, but it’s natural?
How does that happen?
Slowly at first, but then incredibly quickly.
So the real…
I think the beginning of the crisis…
you get local sheriffs and local authorities involved and they can’t explain what’s happening either.
Because, I mean, the ranchers are obviously more knowledgeable than they are about what they’re seeing in the cattle because they don’t spend all day dealing with cattle.
And these ranchers have seen hundreds of dead cattle, which is ultimately what gives their testimony so much credibility.
I mean, they do know more about dead cows than any of us do.
But so the ranchers agree with them.
And the sheriffs agree with the ranchers and they bring that back up.
Then this spreads and sometimes local media will pick it up.
And these are generally small towns.
This is all occurring within this kind of culture of fear and skepticism.
There’s also the Vietnam War.
Yeah, the 70s were a big…
divisive time a lot of american myths are collapsing right so one of the early theories that shows up quite like in in the in the like in stigmata which is the major uh mute zine of the time and like really the the early receptacle for it and it shows up over and over and over again the theory is that well this must be
traumatized veterans coming back from vietnam and this theory continues to show up we’ll i’ll talk more like it is a military psyop is this this replication of actual things that american psychological operations forces did to villages and i don’t want to criticize their newsletter but they missed a great opportunity to call it steak mata i’m just saying that
But we’re going to have to break this episode into two parts.
And I want to make sure that people who listen to this first part tune in for part two, because as this community is coming up and saying, look, we’re suffering economic.
difficulty because of these mutilations it’s more than that like they’re not just saying these cattle are dying they’re saying some very weird stuff is going on there’s a stack of of mysterious unusual quasi-paranormal phenomena going on
And I think it would not be wrong to say government conspiracy, animal testing, satanic cults comes up a lot, a shocking amount of alien conspiracy.
And then, of course, some people just saying, no, no, these are natural deaths, which is not nearly as popular an answer.
So.
Can you set us up for part two?
If we’re going to wind down part one here, tell us about the conspiracy theories that start to stack up.
So that’s the thing.
And part of what drove me to this topic initially was it, as with a lot of these mass paranormal experiences, there’s this very religious component to it.
There’s this very intense, like…
these experiences seem to presage further strange experiences and i think that’s part of what like what propels the the panic in the beginning like at all what makes it so viable that these ranchers who see these dead animals all the time suddenly begin to think oh well maybe it’s the government maybe it’s a cult maybe it’s aliens because people begin to have incredibly strange experiences and continue to have strange experiences
specifically surrounding this ostensibly conventional phenomena.
So some of the theories that, I mean, these people really want to build up theories.
And while now I think the alien abduction theory is probably the most popular, up until the 90s, government involvement or a conspiracy involving…
the meat industry, the idea that there is some occult infection of mad cow disease in the meat supply that the government is surreptitiously testing to avoid a mass panic.
Valdez’s theory, Sheriff Valdez and then his son, who has taken up his legacy investigating these things, believe that these were tied to government investigations into
exposure of radiation.
So at the same time and location that these mutilations are happening, the United States government is engaged in something called Operation Plowshare, where they’re detonating atomic nuclear weapons for civilian purposes, mining and effectively oil fracking.
Now, a lot of these mutilations occur incredibly close to Operation Plowshare sites, and there’s only like four of them.
to perform a multitude of peaceful tasks for the betterment of mankind.
Man is exploring a source of enormous, potentially useful energy, the nuclear explosion.
He sees the potentials and he sees the problems.
To investigate both and to develop the technology that will turn potentials into realities, the United States is conducting, for the benefit of all nations, a program it calls Plowshare.
It’s also in a giant expanse of the country, which is perfect for ranching.
Then you get, particularly we’ll talk about Linda Bolton Howe soon, I’m sure, you start to get the alien explanation, which again has been tied into it since Snippy.
And…
That then gets tied back.
It always gets tied back to this government conspiracy.
There’s a skepticism that the federal government is withholding information, which is why they get involved and get involved so quickly.
I think it starts initially slowly, then it just spirals out of control.
And that’s a good breaking point, I think.
Sorry, I think because what was going to happen is I think.
In 1980, Linda Moulton Howell’s movie, Strange Harvest, is going to take every one of these theories and wrap it up in a beautiful package that she delivers to America, sort of.
We’ll talk about the spread of it.
But I think we need to break here and then come back next week in part two to explain how this stuff explodes nationally and where we end up today.
Thank you so much for joining us, Lee.
We’ll see you next week.
Thank you very much, guys.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard part one of our look into cattle mutilations with independent researcher Lee Weiss.
Be sure to check out the show notes for more info on the topics discussed and for links to books and videos that we brought up.
And you got to come back for part two and the show notes for part two because we will get into way more of Emmy Award winning Linda Moulton Howell’s documentary Strange Harvest.
I think you’ll enjoy my data visualizations about that in the show notes next week.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of Monster Talk.
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The United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, Panama, the Canary Islands, and possibly other South American and European countries have been cut up in strange ways.
Some said this was the work of flying saucers.
This has been a Monster House presentation.

The post 🐂S05E39 – Cattle Mutilations: Part 1🛸 appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Blake and Karen welcome back historian Dr. Joseph Gagné, a specialist in New France and the French colonial period of North America, to talk about Champ – the famous monster of Lake Champlain. Most of the lake sits between New York and Vermont, but about 7% of it lies in Quebec, and Joseph’s upcoming paper in the ethnology journal Rabaska asks a question almost nobody else has: how does the French-speaking side of the border see this most American of lake monsters?

The answer involves a fabricated Samuel de Champlain quote, a five-foot fish that really was a monster in its own way, nearly 300 years of digitized Quebec newspapers, and a curious case of cross-border monster pride – because why borrow Champ when you already have Ponik and Memphré? Plus hoax serpents, colonial werewolf panics, and how Nessie taught every lake monster what a lake monster is supposed to look like.

Episode LinksChamp – the alleged monster of Lake Champlain, which borders New York, Vermont, and Quebec
Samuel de Champlain – the French explorer who named the lake in 1609 and described a fish now generally identified as a longnose gar – though his Indigenous allies described far bigger specimens, more in line with the alligator gar
The famous 1977 Champ photograph was taken by Sandra Mansi
Mary Anning‘s discovery of the plesiosaur helped transform sea dragons into prehistoric survivors – a template later locked in by the Loch Ness Monster
Quebec’s own lake monsters: Ponik of Lake Pohénégamook and Memphré of Lake Memphremagog – plus British Columbia’s tourist-magnet Ogopogo
The Beast of Gévaudan – and its Quebec contemporary, a werewolf reported prowling between Quebec City and Kamouraska in the same era
Monster tourism along the lake: Port Henry, New York and its Champ festival, and the annual Sasquatch Calling Festival in Whitehall, New York
Joseph’s next project: Le Griffon – the first ship to sail west of Niagara Falls, and the first to sink on its maiden voyage in the Great Lakes

Joseph’s Research LinksJoseph’s paper on Champ will be published in issue 24 of Rabaska: revue d’ethnologie de l’Amérique française. You can order a copy from the Société québécoise d’ethnologie, and issues are eventually posted for free on Érudit.

Want to do your own research? Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec’s digital collections hold over 950 digitized periodicals spanning from 1764 to today – many in English!

Follow Joseph’s shenanigans at his site, Curieuse Nouvelle France.

Joseph’s Previous MonsterTalk AppearancesThe Legend of La Corriveau (episode 181)

The Ghost of Ticonderoga (S04E17)

BOOKS discussed in this episode:The Untold Story of Champ: A Social History of America’s Loch Ness Monster [Affiliate Link]

Lake Monster Mysteries: Investigating the World’s Most Elusive Creatures [Affiliate Link]

Champ: Beyond the Legend [Affiliate Link]

Lake Monster Traditions: A Cross-Cultural Analysis [Out of Print – Price WAY TOO high] – But you’re in luck! The Internet Archive has it! and please support them – they’re doing important things for researchers around the world.

PromotionsJoseph’s second book, Voix de guerre: Le renseignement au sein de l’armée française lors de la guerre de Sept Ans en Amérique du Nord, is coming this fall from Presses de l’Université Laval – with a co-edition in France!
Its final chapter covers rumors and superstition during the French and Indian War – very on brand for this show.

Karen’s book Beyond Words is available now. (affiliate link)

CreditsMonsterTalk theme by Peach Stealing Monkeys.

Support the show at monstertalk.org/support – Patreon supporters get extended, commercial-free episodes (including the extended version of this very interview).

SEO TranscriptThis is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

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It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24-mile-long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland, it’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
When we first started Monster Talk, I was hoping to speak to fact-based academics and use monsters as a framework to talk about stuff like biology and physics.
And what about psychology?
Sure, witnesses are people, and surely that has a bearing on what and how they see things, right?
And
We ended up bringing religious studies folk in because what people believe and how they engage with belief through ritual and dogma and faith and pragmatism, that seemed relevant.
And, of course, archaeology.
And we’ve always had monsters for as long as we’ve had language and minds compelled to classify our experiences across a spectrum of normal to highly unusual.
And we enshrine our monsters as embodiments of our fierceness and as…
apotropaics against other monsters.
That’ll be written in stone.
So folklorists helped us understand the transmissibility and mutability of stories.
And we even started bringing in literature and art experts to speak on how we use fiction and creativity to model and to inspire.
These fields of study all hinted different perspectives and different approaches.
And every discipline and academic expertise has brought us a little bit closer to understanding what a monster is.
Historians bring a critical lens to the historiography of monsters, analyzing how primary sources and media and print culture construct, perpetuate, and transform these narratives over time.
Where other disciplines hunt for physical proof, historians investigate why these stories persisted and what they reveal about the specific societal and cultural anxieties of the people who recorded them.
A funny thing I noticed when thinking about this intro, though, the historians we’ve had on sure seem to like werewolves.
I guess our first was Brian Riegel, who argued that it wasn’t silver bullets that took out the werewolf, but rather Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
And historian Jay Smith taught us about the role of tabloid journalism on the metaphysical power to turn mundane but awful packs of wolves into the magical beasts of Gévaudan.
And today’s guest, Dr. Joseph Gagne, also loves werewolves, which is why we’ve brought him on again to talk about lake monsters.
Well, you may think I’m just subverting expectations, but in fact, there is some actual truth there because while not every monster is a werewolf, I am becoming more and more convinced that every monster is a shape changer.
As we transmit stories, both the sender and the receiver change the information and shape it within their own imagination.
And this is true for werewolves and Sasquatch and Thunderbirds and the actual subject of today’s discussion, lake monsters.
In a lake that lies nestled between Vermont, New York, and Quebec, it is said that there is a monster.
If you go look in monster books, you’ll read about French explorer Samuel de Champlain reporting seeing a 20-foot serpent thick as a barrel with a head like a horse.
Of course, that quote doesn’t come from 1609.
It comes from 1970.
It was in the summer 1970 issue of Vermont Life magazine and an article by Marjorie Porter titled The Champlain Monster.
In 1977, lake visitor Sandra Mancy would log her sighting with a famous monster photo.
Champ is many things.
The monster was like a serpent.
It was like a plesiosaur.
It had many humps.
It had one hump.
It was just a head.
It was just awake moving through the water.
You can check our show notes on this episode and learn more about the different ways this monster has been reported and depicted.
But our guest…
Dr. Gagné has an upcoming paper that’s looking back at the original report by Champlain and also examining a really interesting question.
Most of the sightings happen on the parts of the lake that are in the United States.
But how is Champ viewed on the other side of that border in the land of poutine, maple syrup, and Mounties?
Let’s find out.
Monster Talk
Welcome back to the show.
And correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this now Dr. Joseph Gagne?
Yes, it is.
Awesome.
Yes, it is.
Congratulations.
I’m still proud of that.
Thank you.
That’s so cool.
You should be proud.
And it also is, once again, something that overlaps with audience interest, I think.
Absolutely.
You’re talking about CHAMP.
And you’re bringing an interesting perspective here because usually we hear about CHAMP from the American side of the lakes.
And I think that’s actually an interesting part of the research you’ve done here.
So I don’t.
want to spoil it, but what we’re going to try to do is guide you through the sort of Reader’s Digest version of your essay.
And then for listeners, they can go to a URL that we’ll put in into the show notes and find the essay this fall.
So what are we talking about with Champ?
I guess we should just pretend that someone has never listened to this show and they’ve never heard of Champ.
What is Champ?
Where is Champ?
Why is Champ?
Champ is the name of the mysterious denizen of the underwater world of Lake Champlain, which happens to be, yes, mostly in the U.S., right between the borders of New York and Vermont.
But a 7% portion of it is in the French-speaking province of Quebec.
If you don’t get it from the Champlain region, then it’s merely sparkling lake water.
I was going to say sparkling lake monster.
That’s a good one.
That’s a good one.
And that’s what got me interested was the fact, well, I am a New France specialist.
And so this is the French colonial period of most of North America.
And Lake Champlain bears the name of the explorer, Samuel de Champlain.
I kept reading about this story that Champlain was the first to see Champ, the lake monster of Lake Champlain.
So the question is, is this true?
Yeah.
Now, I’m not the first to have thought, well, you just got to read the original document to find out.
And so many people have done so, namely Robert Bartholomew.
You have Joe Nickel and Ben Radford.
Also, Michel Meuget also read the original document.
How do you say that?
Because I always say Meuget or Meuget.
That’s what I thought.
And then I asked someone who was Belgian, and he’s like, oh, I don’t know.
I would have said Mergie.
I was like, oh, okay.
Well, I can put it like that.
I just presumed you have to pronounce it.
Yeah, yeah.
Because I didn’t know if I had to pronounce it the French way or like a German way, so I wasn’t sure.
No, no, that’s good.
That’s good to know.
So one more time.
Mergie.
Mergie.
Neat.
Yeah, Mergie.
Yeah.
Mergie.
And don’t knock the Belgians because, sure, they’re terrible colonialists, but they also gave us palm frits.
And for that, we’re thankful.
Also, if there are Belgians that want to correct me, please do so.
Sure.
Yeah.
Different across regions.
Then came the question, well, who is writing about Champ?
And when you look through the historiography, that is like the history of the history, basically they’re all American authors.
And so you always get an American view of the legend.
But my question was…
Or also the fact that, like, more than 90% of the lake is on your side.
Sure, whatever.
We’re number one is all I’m saying.
Yeah.
But, see, that’s why I kept wondering, though.
I thought, well, I mean, there is a tiny portion of the lake that’s on our side of the border, so surely we must talk about it.
Yeah.
Which is really, I joke a lot, but that’s a really solid insight, right?
So, yeah.
It is.
It certainly is.
And what I thought was curious was every time you hear about sightings, it’s always Americans.
And I started wondering, well, are there any sightings on the Quebec side?
And so…
When you do research, you want to find proper sources.
And in Quebec, we are very lucky because the National Archives of Quebec, and my bosses will insist that I do mention Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec.
On our website, we have digitized over 950 Quebec periodicals.
And if anyone is interested, not all in French, we do have a handful of titles that are in English as well.
And so I was able to keyword search through nearly 300 years worth of newspapers on our side of the border for Sea Serpent, Lake Champlain Monster, Champlain Dragon, or whatever I thought might have been used.
And I ended up with about 50 mentions of the monster throughout the years.
And…
My grand conclusion, funnily enough, is that clearly Quebec is paying attention to the monster.
But strangely, it’s always reporting what Americans say they saw.
Are we Quebec’s Florida man?
Is that what we are?
I think what’s interesting is that in the early 1980s, I believe he was an archaeologist, Joseph Zarzynski compiled a list of about 224 counts of sightings between…
1609 which is the day that champlain probably saw the monster if he did see it because that was the year he named the the lake after first exploring it uh and sightings all the way to 1984.
But what’s interesting is that he only had a single eyewitness from the Quebec side.
And he had literally written to French newspapers on the Canadian side asking, has anyone seen the Lake Champlain monster?
Because he realized that the weird thing, there is no French Canadian eyewitnesses to the monster.
And Robert Bartholomew…
barely found more.
He found about three people.
And so you see there’s really this disconnect between Americans seeing the monster and French Canadians seeing the monster.
Now, geographically, once again, it does make sense when you realize that most of Lake Champlain is on the American side.
Also, the cooler, deep waters are on the American side.
So, you know, it just kind of fits with the whole Loch Ness vibe with the mountains and so on.
Meanwhile, the average depth of the water on the Canadian side is about 14 feet.
So not quite impressive.
And so, oh, look, there’s a monster.
Oh, never mind, it’s a seaweed.
I can clearly see it within 14 feet of water.
But what I think happens is that there’s a kind of national pride going on because a theme that seems to be brought up every once in a while by journalists is this weird scoffing of…
We have our own critters like that.
And sure enough, Quebec does have many lake monsters.
The two most famous being Poinic, the lake monster from Lake Poinigamook.
And you also have Memphrey from the Lake Memphremangog.
And what’s interesting is that the…
When you read the papers, people seem really proud of these monsters going, these are ours and only ours.
And so there’s this weird national pride, even though part of Lake Champlain is on the Canadian side.
Apparently, Quebecers just decided, yep, nope, we’re better than that.
We have our own lake monsters.
What’s also very interesting, Ben and Joe, in their book on Lake Monsters, had described these two monsters basically as Champ Light.
Oh, you’re talking about Lake Monster Mysteries?
Yes.
They had basically said that they’re a diet version of Champ, and so there’s many parallels.
And sure enough, you see, just like…
you have a lot of tourism based around, uh, uh, champ on, on the, uh, especially on the New York side with, uh, Port Henry and crown point and so on, but also on the Vermont side, uh, these monsters on the Canadian side also have, uh, have a lot to do with, with tourism.
And in fact, I thought I found this really damning, uh, editorial from 1957, uh, with, uh, this was, uh,
with memfray where someone literally wrote hey you know it’s kind of cool how tourists like flock to see ogopogo in bc we should have our own monster wink wink and see what happens well i want to step in at this point and and ask you why this is the case i mean you’re addressing it
in in some ways but why did champ become popular in the united states but never really catch on in in quebec or in canada in general so i hear you’re talking about is it panic and uh memphrey uh but but why why didn’t champ really catch on there
I think it’s because there is a first claim.
Early on, you start having these festivals in Port Henry, for example, and they’re very lucrative.
And so what happens is if you’re thinking economically, and this is, of course, just a working hypothesis, but if you’re thinking economically, we don’t really want to compete.
so you want to have your own thing and maybe have a monster tourism.
So maybe someone after seeing that festival will say, uh, might not want to go to another champ theme festival, but might say, Oh, well let’s go check out this other monster.
That’s different.
Uh, so that could be an idea, but all in all, I think it’s, it’s also the fact that, uh,
In general, Champ seems to be a lot more present in the American media.
And so in Canada, it’s more like a secondary story where they’re always just reporting, oh, by the way, Americans are talking about this monster.
And so it’s not organically within the culture and it’s more in the print culture whenever they’re trying to fill blanks by inspiring themselves with American print.
I see.
Which is really something we’ve been honing back in on again and again around here.
And you’ve brought it up.
I really need to read Michel Merget.
I need to read his book because multiple people have talked to me about how important the concepts are there.
But one of the ideas he talks about is this idea that lake monsters are sort of paper tigers.
But he doesn’t mean it in the sort of…
way that that’s sort of colloquially used.
He’s talking about the role of media in growing and perpetuating monster concepts.
And I think I first hit on this with the Beast of Gévaudan, where… Jay Smith’s book.
Jay Smith came on and was talking about how that the broadsheet newspapers were really looking for content and they would publish any kind of crazy story if it perpetuated the idea there’s a monster ravaging…
The landscape.
Do you want an anecdote in parentheses here?
Sure, hop in.
Quebec does the same thing.
Well, that’s exactly what I was wondering.
Exactly the same period as the Beast of Gévaudan.
Oh, it’s the same time period, okay.
It’s the same time period, and literally they’re saying, hey, careful, there’s a werewolf that’s traveling between Quebec and Kamouraska further downriver.
And they say it’s just as dangerous as the one in Givaudan.
Wow.
And this is exactly the same period as there are no ships coming in or out because winter’s coming up and so on.
And so it’s a low point for news.
And so clearly that’s what’s going on.
Wow.
That is interesting.
I mean, obviously, in my heart, I feel like maybe the role of the media is underplayed because it is the mechanism by which we hear monster stories more often than not.
Very few, I mean, maybe this is more common back in the past to be sitting around at a party and someone tells you, here, what happened to so-and-so.
I mean, obviously, urban legends are called that for a reason.
But the media is definitely…
I don’t necessarily blame the one who used the word complicit, but I mean, it’s more than that because don’t forget today, you know, when you want to read your news or what, what do you do?
First thing is you go on the internet and sadly, social media is now becoming the number one source of news.
But back in the day, they were.
It was directly through newspapers.
It’s in the name, newspapers.
And so you could literally have manufacturing areas where you would literally have someone hired just to read the newspaper to the workers as they’re working.
So everyone is getting exactly the same news.
Yeah, interesting.
And so this is why newspapers are so central for spreading these rumors, these stories, and so on.
Yeah, I think of them as sort of nodes or like within a network.
You know, they’re a special kind of node because they’ll spread it to anyone who’ll read it or listen to it.
But yeah, so there’s an editorial component where whoever is putting out what deciding what’s in the paper.
And maybe that doesn’t exist as much or now it’s an algorithm instead.
But but the parallels are strong that that what makes the story I’m going to air quote go viral because I don’t really like.
the idea of virality but i don’t really have a better mech you know analog but it people refer to it yeah it is and uh thanks richard dawkins but anyway the the media has a huge role here i mean they’re they’re an important part uh maybe the only parallel i could think of is the person
who collects monster stories and puts them into books because those people also become nodes.
And I think maybe Jeb Card came up with this idea, but the idea that maybe a window area, maybe it was him, but a window area is not where monsters happen.
It’s where a person who cares enough to share the stories happens and they make a window area by collecting stories.
I kind of think of those as like the Wi-Fi amplifiers.
It’s just as the signal’s getting weaker and people are about to forget about a monster, someone comes along, creates a compendium of monster tales, and then throws it back into the wild.
Well, what about tourism then?
So we’re talking about social media.
What role does tourism play in keeping…
these lake monster legends alive today oh a lot uh case in point uh port uh port henry and you’ll have to forgive me i’m forgetting the the dates but i i do know they had i believe it was a smelting he who melts it smelts it that’s what they say
And so they were steel manufacturers.
And at some point, the industry died down locally.
And so they were a little desperate to boost up the local economy.
And they came up with the idea for this festival.
And at some point, when you read the 1980s newspapers, they’re complaining that they’re…
The festival is working so well, they don’t know where to put the people coming into town.
So you can see that it is a boon, a seasonal boon to help boost up the area.
And you see that all along the Lake Champlain corridor.
Oh, what’s that little town?
There’s a little town.
And it’s funny because…
I think this started just before the pandemic, and just as I was like, oh, I’ve got to do this, they have a Bigfoot calling contest every September.
Oh, you know what?
I think I’ve heard people hollering for Bigfoot.
Whitehall, but something like that.
I have a vague recollection of watching a video of people stepping up to a microphone and making their best Bigfoot call.
Whitehall is an epicenter of Bigfoot sightings.
in the Northeast.
We’re here for the calling contest and it should be a lot of fun.
you see that it is becoming something.
And in fact, on the Quebec side, like I said, I, I’m hypothesizing that they don’t want to compete with another monster.
They’d rather just create their own.
And in the case of, even I have a hard time pronouncing this, like the city chose the monster as their logo.
And it kind of looks like a literal water dragon.
It really has like a dragon head.
Yeah.
And so they encourage people.
And it’s really funny because their promotional material, when you look for ads for their town, the vibe is basically come for the monster, but stay for the summer sports and the food and the so on.
That is so interesting.
A couple of times you’ve mentioned sightings as dragons instead of necessarily like monsters.
Yeah, in colonial days, yes.
Yeah, so is there a kind of difference?
Do you get those dragon sightings today, or is that colonial only?
That is very colonial talk.
In fact, it’s funny, when you’re researching these topics, you see the evolution of terms.
For example…
I’ve never really seen dragon for champ, but the term sea serpent or just serpent tended to disappear after the 19th century, replaced by monster.
Interesting.
And during colonial times, what’s interesting is, again, the power of media.
Because, as I explain in the paper, to try to explain, well, is it plausible that Champlain thinks he saw a lake monster?
Does his French colonial culture allow for the existence of sea monsters?
And it’s yes and no, where cartography, even by 1609,
european cartography is starting to get rid of monsters on the on the maps we all know the here here be monsters trope uh yeah yeah yeah because cartographers want to be as accurate as possible and they’re now willing to just say you know what we have no idea what’s over here and they will literally spell it out no idea what’s here yeah
But even though the educated portion of society is now backing away from monsters, that doesn’t mean that the average person stopped believing in these.
And so every once in a while, you do have these glimpses of tales of sea monsters.
But again, the fact that they are rare in the written record…
is more indicative of fewer people knowing how to write in French colonial society than people not believing in them.
Because we do have indications.
Every once in a while, it’s like looking for, it’s like a whack-a-mole.
Every once in a while, you know that belief is there and it pops up once in a while.
But again, I got to remind the listeners that contrary to New England and all the other British colonies, New France was nowhere near as literate.
We’re talking about 10% of people in the countryside knowing how to at least sign their name and about 40% in the city.
And not only that, but when they did, it was in French.
And who understands that?
No idea what you’re talking about.
So the naming is kind of in line with people’s beliefs at the time, what’s plausible, whether it’s a dragon or a serpent or an undiscovered creature.
Is that what you want to say?
It’s relevant because what I wanted to say was we see…
dragons continuing to appear in American newspapers all through the last half of the 19th century.
It becomes like a big thing.
We talked about the tombstone episode where the tombstone epitaph flying lizard, but what happened in the early part of the 1800s that transformed sea monsters.
Mary Anning discovers the plesiosaur.
And suddenly the idea of sea dragons is not as interesting or popular as the idea of plesiosaurs and the idea that maybe these prehistoric, mesozoic marine reptiles, right?
I think this matters like a lot.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And in fact, you’re seeing that also with sea serpents, just the term serpent.
What really caught me off guard was I was trying to illustrate at some point also, well, you know, do hoaxes exist?
They obviously do.
Do we have examples of hoaxes throughout Quebec’s history?
And there are plenty.
And one of my favorite ones was in the 1800s, there were four young gentlemen who claimed to have found a sea serpent.
And while all this speculation is going on in the newspaper, is it real?
Is it not?
I was surprised when one newspaper went as far as saying, oh, this serpent might actually be of a plesiosaur kind.
Nice.
I was really surprised.
I was like, whoa, this is way before Nessie.
Because…
Champ, as Robert Bartholomew had really masterfully demonstrated, Champ is like this amorphous creature where at some point it looks like a giant slug, at some point it’s an alligator, at some point it just keeps changing until…
there’s this comparison with Nessie and then it just kind of solidifies and stays in the shape of a plesiosaur.
And so it’s interesting seeing how Nessie really…
influenced all lake monsters, because all of a sudden, there’s this kind of consensus, okay, this is what a lake monster is supposed to look like.
But until then, I mean, people are constantly…
They’re constantly…
changing what the monster looks like according to the eyewitness, which also brings up the question, well, what did Champlain actually see?
Did he see something?
It does.
As we like to say in question number seven, what did he actually see?
What did he write?
What did he write?
Well, this is the fascinating part.
So just to, the story is kind of funny to begin with, because when he arrives in Quebec, he befriends passing Indigenous people, namely the Wendats that are traditionally lived in…
rather than Ontario, but they did regularly travel through the St. Lawrence.
And he also befriended the local Algonquins, including the Innu.
And…
as he was having arrangements with them going like, well, can I set up a little fur trading post in what is now Quebec City?
They said, oh, absolutely.
And in exchange, well, do you want to help us if ever we’re at war with an enemy?
And Sean Plain’s like, sure, hoping that will never happen.
Not realizing, no, no, they’re currently at war.
with the five Iroquois nations.
It’s not as hypothetical as he thought.
It’s not as hypothetical.
So you can imagine Sean playing a year later when his indigenous friends are like, hey, about that promise, you want to come with?
And he’s like, wait a minute.
And what’s hilarious is that he initially had a…
a lot of men that were supposed to follow him and they all chickened out except for two so you got three three Frenchmen along with about 60 indigenous people also on their side the only ones who didn’t chicken out going to Lake Champlain to confront a war party of Iroquois and Champlain was hoping that
his firearm would suffice to terrorize the enemy, which it did.
This is right before the Iroquois start trading with the…
Were we talking, like, rifles?
Or, like, he had a small cannon?
Because, I mean, that makes…
It’s crazy how much… How do you translate an arquebuse?
How do you pronounce that?
It’s a wheel lock.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, wheel lock.
There we go.
Yeah, so all the old school…
In high school, I was fascinated with all kinds of early guns and weapon books all the time.
Like I was a nerd.
It was so embarrassing.
That’s reassuring.
But that’s the thing, right?
Champlain was lucky because unlike you, the Iroquois did not know much about firearms yet.
Right, right.
Although this is just before the…
It’s like the one guy showing up with a laser pistol, right?
It matters.
It’s a big deal.
Exactly.
Right, yeah.
So years later, the Dutch will supply them with weapons.
For a fee.
But as Champlain is traveling, what’s fascinating when you read him, he is really interested in everything.
So he’s literally writing as he’s in enemy territory, he’s looking like, oh, look at the mountains.
These are the most beautiful trees I’ve ever seen.
And he starts talking about fish and so on.
And at some point, he talks about this creature that he sees.
Now, ever since the 1970s,
Most works on Champ will say, oh, he saw basically a plesiosaur, this horse-like head just craning over the water and then diving again.
But in reality…
What he actually described is a fish about five feet long, which when you look at his sketch and the way he described it is clearly a long-nosed gar.
Now, I’m not innovating by describing the fish.
Many people have already said it was a long-nosed gar.
What’s interesting, however, is that even ichthyologists…
that red Champlain were very dubious about Champlain’s indigenous allies telling him, oh yeah, we’ve seen some that were like 12 feet long.
Because they’re clearly talking about something way bigger than a long-nosed gar.
And since the only gar that gets that size is the alligator gar, which does not go further up north than, I think, the Illinois River.
well people just dismissed it as oh they don’t know what they’re talking about but as a french colonial historian i got to remind i got to remind people indigenous people as well as fur traders traveled really really far and so champlain’s indigenous allies are either talking about what they’ve heard from other
allies further out west or they themselves have traveled far enough and they probably did into the interior of the continent that they’ve seen them and so they might be conflagrating both species but to them they clearly recognize there’s bigger fish out there and so in a certain way uh even a five foot gar is a five foot long nose gar is still pretty impressive
I like to say, well, he did, in a way, see a monster.
I mean, I love fishing, and I would love catching one of those.
But, I mean, alligator gar, even today, I think alligator gar and catfish are both nodes for folklore.
I mean, like, I grew up in a small southern town, and we had legendary alligator gar in lakes and rivers that I don’t even think were there.
But there’s such a monstrous fish.
And they’re plausible because they’re real animals.
They still today, people like a giant catfish, a giant alligator gar, even now are in.
Let me also add that I maybe this is groundbreaking revelation, but fish people sometimes lie.
You know, one of my favorite, favorite fishing jokes is, yeah, my uncle used to brag about his six inch fishes.
And then the friend goes, six inches, that’s not big.
Oh, I forgot to mention, he measures between the eyes.
Nice.
That’s the kind of same phenomenon you see in the media, because what’s interesting is that around in the 1920s is the first time someone mentions a link between Champlain and the Lake Champlain monster.
Now, Robert Bartholomew had really identified the first store on the American side as being from the 1970s with, what was it, Vermont Life, I think.
And I forget the name of the author who had described basically Champlain seeing a plesiosaur type creature.
But in the 1920s, French Canadian newspapers were already talking about, oh, is the Lake Champlain monster a big fish?
And so the first…
mentions of the story are fairly accurate.
You know, they’re more paraphrasing what, what Champlain said, but every retelling, the fish gets bigger and scarier and with more teeth.
And so you see the mutation into a monster fish until finally it’s just a monster.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And I think that’s, I mean, in the things that you shared with us and what we’ve seen of the pre-publication, it’s very compelling.
It’s not shocking, and it still happens today.
The human need to turn mundane, natural things.
They’re not mundane.
They’re interesting and outstanding, but they’re natural.
Into something more than that is very understandable.
It happens all the time right now, but you’ve done a great job of bringing that fact with the historicity of the materials that you’ve pulled together.
I know there’s a barrier here around the language, but I really would encourage people to…
when this is published to look it up and read it.
And we will certainly share that with our listeners when that goes live.
Yeah.
I think that there’s so much that has been written from the U.S. angle that it’s really important to have this Quebec perspective.
So I think it’s wonderful work that you’ve done.
And fun.
It’s cool.
I don’t know.
But I’m curious now, Joseph, what are you working on now?
Right now, I have two projects right now because I have my second book coming out also this fall.
And I’m super excited to say that not only will it be published in North America, I just found out it’s going to be a co-edition with France.
So I’m actually surprised, like, my God, I’m going to be published in France.
So again, a French book.
That book is on military intelligence during the French and Indian War on the French side.
There’s actually a whole chapter.
My last chapter is all about rumors and superstition where people are like, oh, we’ve seen the Virgin Mary in the sky.
Clearly we’ve won.
And so opposition between like what French officers believe and what indigenous people believe and then the clash of beliefs and so on.
So it’s very apropos with what we’re talking about today with like…
beliefs and and and media and so on uh and my second project is the same one as the last time i was on the show uh uh i’m i’m trying to finally finish uh a paper slash possibly short book on the search for the giddy phone or the griffin the first ship to sail uh west of
niagara falls and also the first ship to sink during its maiden voyage in the great lakes wow that’s and it’s such an interesting idea uh in in under reported so that’ll be really cool
It sounds like a future Monster Talk episode.
It does.
Yeah, especially this one is fascinating because…
Does it become a ghost ship?
It does become a ghost ship.
Oh, like the Mary Celeste.
There you go.
It does become a ghost ship.
I actually do discuss the folklore of it very shortly.
But what’s fascinating is you have over 20 shipwrecks that were told, aha, this is the Griffin, even though there’s never any proof.
So the paper slash possibly book is in two halves.
The first half is what do we really know?
I’m really trying to go through all the primary sources.
And then the second part is, well, here’s basically the history of the three most famous cases, including one I will not name for now, but I know people will be very, very disappointed on the Canadian side when I poke holes in their theory that their shipwreck is the Griffin
When it is clearly not in a weird feedback loop.
I have to thank you guys because I’ve also added a reference from your show on the episode on Griffins.
Oh, nice.
Oh, good stuff.
I added that book.
I forgot the name of the author, but I added, I added the author’s book in the list when discussing what is a Griffin?
Exactly.
Exactly.
So fascinating.
Well, as always, every time we talk, I think we can just keep talking.
But obviously, we can’t really just keep talking because you have to come back for another episode.
You can always come back.
That’s exactly right.
So just this is really cool.
And thank you for giving us a sneak peek at what’s coming up.
And we will definitely share this.
We can go in and put a link out to the magazine or the journal.
And when it goes live, we’ll share that with the listeners and remind them.
Be sure to remind us, but we’ll be keeping an eye out for it.
We will.
Sounds good.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Anything else, Karen?
No, I think that’s it.
Joseph, thank you so much.
Have a great night.
Please keep up the good work.
I know it’s hard, but you’re doing good stuff, man.
Oh, you are.
Yeah, so nice to chat.
Have a good night.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard an interview with Joseph Gagné discussing his upcoming article on the Lake Champlain Monster, which will be published soon in Rabosca, a journal of French-American ethnology.
Links to that magazine, Joseph’s new book, and all sorts of research goodies, especially for the French speakers and readers out there, are in the show notes.
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How do skeptics stay hydrated in droughts?
They have their own well, actually.
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Note: This episode deals with murder and goes into some detail, so we’re putting the “explicit tag” for the mature content, perhaps not suitable for all audiences.

MonsterTalk steps outside its usual territory for a true-crime case with a paranormal afterlife. Blake and Karen welcome Hallie, host of The Morbid Curiosity Podcast, to revisit one of the most notorious unsolved crimes in American history: the August 1892 axe murders of Andrew and Abby Borden in Fall River, Massachusetts, and the trial that acquitted Andrew’s daughter Lizzie while leaving much of the public convinced she did it.

Drawing on Hallie’s background in anthropology and skeletal analysis, the conversation lays out the timeline, the forensic evidence, and the tangle of rumor and theory that has kept the case alive for more than a century – before turning to the crime scene itself, now run as “America’s most haunted” bed-and-breakfast, and asking what, if anything, still lingers there.

The murders themselvesHallie walks the timeline: Abby killed first (roughly 9:30 to 10:30 am), Andrew shortly before his body was found around 11:15. The famous “forty whacks” is folklore – Abby suffered about 18 hatchet wounds and Andrew 10 to 11, with one of Andrew’s eyes cut clean in two. Not forty, but gruesome overkill all the same.

Forensics on the frontierCrime-scene photography was brand new in 1892. Right around this moment, French researcher Alphonse Bertillon was standardizing forensic photography – the dual-pose mugshot, the top-down crime-scene shot with a measurement grid in frame. The Borden bodies were photographed where they fell and the images were used at the 1893 trial, and a sensation-hungry press turned them into grisly woodcut illustrations for readers across the country.

Blood, dresses, and the “naked murderess”Karen raises the wardrobe puzzle: the dress Lizzie wore that morning had no blood on it, a second dress she said was paint-stained got burned, and a blood-spotted bucket she attributed to menstruation. Hallie, who knows her historic clothing, explains why a quick change would have been tough – layers, corsets, buttons, ribbons – and why the “she did it naked and changed after” theory runs into the problem that two murders meant two changes. (Also home to the finest accidental pun of the episode, courtesy of Karen: “clothing of the period.”)

The cyanide questionThe detail that pushes Blake off the fence: the day before the murders, Lizzie reportedly tried to buy prussic acid – cyanide – at a local pharmacy, claiming she needed it to clean a sealskin cape. The druggist refused, and that testimony was ultimately kept from the jury as too far removed from the crime. Blake notes a competing moth-fumigation version, Hallie flags that both Abby and Lizzie had voiced fears of being poisoned days earlier, and Karen adds that Lizzie was medicated on morphine during the inquest – which may help explain her famously muddled testimony.

Acquittal and aftermathPart of the “how did she walk?” answer is her defense – a former governor of Massachusetts with a silver tongue and a gift for getting damaging evidence (like the cyanide trip) excluded. Blake and Karen connect it to money and the courts, with a nod to the JonBenet Ramsey case. Public opinion swung too: sympathetic during the trial, then sharply against Lizzie afterward as she moved to a Hill mansion, dropped her charities, befriended actresses, and became permanently estranged from her sister Emma, who left and never returned.

America’s most haunted dead-and-breakfastOn the paranormal side, the house now runs as a bed-and-breakfast under paranormal-tourism company US Ghost Adventures, with ghost tours and overnight hunts. The crew stays skeptical: the original Sci-Fi Channel Ghost Hunters came away empty in 2006, the official ghost tours only began in 2004, and – as Joe Nickell has argued – the “haunting” is largely people primed by a spooky setting and a true story imagining what happened there. Blake ties it to work by Chris French and Richard Wiseman on the real drivers of ghost experiences, and his own rule of thumb: a true-crime site literally owned by a company called US Ghost Adventures is naturally selecting for a good ghost story.

Hallie’s favorite monster: the LeshenFor our signature closing question, Hallie picks the Leshen – the antlered, deer-skulled forest guardian from The Witcher 3, a darker spin on the gentler tree-spirit of Slavic folklore. It launches Blake into one of his favorite themes: how games, art, and online image-making quietly rewrite what a monster “is” – the same drift that gave the Wendigo its now-ubiquitous antlered look and changed what people report when they say they’ve seen one.

Links and further reading* Lizzie Borden – Wikipedia overview of the case * The Lizzie Borden House – history of the crime scene and its life as a tourist site * The Trial of Lizzie Borden: An Account – UMKC Famous Trials archive (transcripts, exhibits, timeline) * Prussic acid (hydrogen cyanide) – the poison Lizzie allegedly tried to buy * Alphonse Bertillon – the figure behind early scientific crime-scene photography * Joe Nickell, “Lizzie Borden’s Eighty-One Whacks” – Skeptical Inquirer, March/April 2020 * The Leshy – the Slavic forest spirit behind Hallie’s pick * Andrzej Sapkowski – Polish author of The Witcher

Books* The Trial of Lizzie Borden by Cara Robertson – the definitive modern account, drawn from the court record * The Witcher series by Andrzej Sapkowski – start with The Last Wish, then Blood of Elves

PromotionsKaren’s latest: Beyond Words by Karen Stollznow – a deep dive into the science of psycholinguistics, from animal communication to AI, wild children to word slips, and first words to last. (Blake is reliably informed it counts as a grown-up book that he is still allowed to enjoy.)

From our guest, Hallie: catch her show, the Morbid Curiosity podcast, including her two-part Lizzie Borden coverage – Morbid Curiosity – Lizzie Borden (remastered).

CreditsMonsterTalk theme music is by Peach Stealing Monkeys.

Got a theory about who really did it? Bring it to our Facebook group or our Patreon – and, as always, keep it polite, wontcha?

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Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother 40 whacks.
When she realized what she’d done, she gave her father 41 whacks.
It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature.
Part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24 mile long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland.
It’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
We generally eschew true crime here at Monster Talk due to a variety of reasons, not the least of which is my apparent abiding need to avoid financial success.
I’m joking, but true crime continues to be a financial juggernaut fueled by what many would characterize as morbid curiosity.
So, it does feel a bit apropos that our Virgil for this trek outside of our normal domain is the host of a podcast literally called Morbid Curiosity.
Her name is Hallie, and our topic is the sensational 19th century crime often referred to as the Lizzie Borden murders.
But our journey is not so far outside the monster adjacent as to keep us from discussing the paranormal aspects of the aftermath to this famous crime.
I can see why this story fascinated people at the time and why it still does.
The crime was violent and shocked the community and the nation.
but I will hold any further ruminations back until after the interview.
So let’s now join Hallie from the Morbid Curiosity podcast as we travel back to New England in 1892.
Monster Talk
Welcome to the show, Hallie.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Yeah.
I have a background in anthropology and archaeology.
I did an undergraduate in those.
And then I did a postgrad in human skeletal analysis.
So my main work has been with skeletons.
I previously worked in museums and libraries, mostly in the archives.
where research was the main goal of the job.
And I really loved it.
I loved hanging out in rooms full of old books.
And while I was doing that work, I would always be listening to podcasts.
So I’ve loved podcasts for a long time.
I’ve been listening to Monster Talk since 2015 or so.
Oh, wow.
So it’s really awesome to be on the show.
Oh, it’s good to have you here.
As I said, a lot of mutual interests, I think.
Yeah, definitely.
Well, that’s definitely how I found you guys.
Well, thanks for joining us.
I think Karen did a pretty good job of setting up how we picked this topic out of all the topics that your show covers.
But I’ll be honest, I went through a phase where I was really into true crime, but I’ve sort of burned out on it.
And so we don’t cover it very often, even though I’m still interested and very familiar with a lot of these stories.
um in fact especially the paranormal angles for sure but there’s like right now there’s a big serial killer exhibition in atlanta and my wife and i went because kathleen loves this stuff um and uh well like a lot of people i mean in fact i mean if you think about podcasting podcasting was just chugging along just fine until the first super hit came along with serial
True Crime is absolutely what really catapulted podcasting out of the, what do you want to call it?
The slums?
I don’t know.
Into the solid suburbs.
The nerdy niches of all the corners of the internet.
There’s a lot of people who love True Crime.
I guess my point is I’ve read a lot about various horrific murders, but we haven’t covered a lot of them here.
And I’m making assumptions that everybody knows who Lizzie Borden is, but maybe not.
So let’s assume that some of our audience doesn’t know anything about this crime and the many hypotheses about it.
And maybe you can give us a 101 on who’s Lizzie Borden, who got murdered, what she got to do with it.
Where are the bodies?
What’s the evidence?
You know, the basics.
Definitely.
Well, Lizzie Borden is an alleged axe murderer who allegedly killed her father and stepmother in 1892, allegedly.
We’re saying because we don’t want to get sued, right?
No, it’s all, everybody thinks she did it, basically, but she was acquitted of this murder.
A lot of people at the time still believed she was the one who killed them.
And it’s still an unsolved murder and a pretty gruesome one at that.
And people are very fascinated by it, including me, which is why she’s famous.
Why wasn’t she convicted?
Because everyone in the jury was a quitter.
All right.
Sorry.
So she was acquitted, but she’s still famous.
Yeah.
The reason that the trial got so much attention was because it was a very, very violent crime.
Basically, there wasn’t a lot of evidence to prove that anyone did it.
Like it was there was blood everywhere, but they couldn’t find the killer.
Who died?
I guess we should.
Her father and her stepmother.
Her evil stepmother?
Possibly.
We don’t know.
Gotcha.
I just always have to assume that, right?
Yeah, always.
We know that she and her sister didn’t like her stepmother very much.
And we know that there was some pretty intense tension in the house between Lizzie and her older sister, Emma.
And their stepmother, whose name is Abby, Abby Borden.
And their father, Andrew Borden, was kind of a character in that he was quite a rich guy.
He had a lot of money.
He ran several textile mills and owned a lot of real estate.
But he didn’t like to spend any money.
So there was some resentment that had been noted by other friends and family that Lizzie and Emma thought perhaps he could shell out a little bit more.
Like they lived in the industrial part of town next to his textile mills instead of in the more affluent area of town called The Hill.
So…
They never really had people over.
They didn’t do any entertaining because they were embarrassed of their living situation.
They lived at 92 2nd Street is the address of the house where the murders took place.
And it was a duplex that had been pretty roughly converted into a single family home.
which is important later.
I was just going to ask you just regarding the relationship between Lizzie and her father, that it was further strained because he’d actually given some money to Abby’s family or purchased a house for them and yet wouldn’t purchase mod cons for them or buy a house for them.
So is there truth to that, that he was giving money to…
To her and her family, but not to his girls?
Well, sort of.
So Abby had, I think it was her sister, was living in a house with her mother and her mother wanted to leave her share of the house.
And…
I believe Abby asked Andrew to buy that share so that her sister could keep living there without paying any rent.
And when he did this, he agreed.
When he agreed…
Lizzie and Emma both got quite offended and said, well, anything she gets, we should also have.
He tried to sort of mullify the situation by buying them each a piece of property.
He bought one house for them both to have in their names.
Okay.
He was trying to fix the situation by giving them property.
And it kind of worked, but after this incident…
they would no longer eat breakfast with either of their parents.
Like, it caused a great offense.
And I’m not quite sure why.
Like, I don’t really understand what the offense was, but they also all got the same allowance.
Like, each of them received a certain amount of money every week, and it was the same.
Whereas Emma and Lizzie’s, they could use for whatever they wanted, and Abby had to use hers for the house.
So it was kind of, it was really like…
the girls sort of ran things.
You know what I mean?
Like he, he was very, while he was quite strict, I think, especially with money, he definitely had a soft spot for his girls more than his wife.
It seems.
Okay.
That’s interesting.
I’ve heard so many different versions of these stories and stories that maybe he had molested the girls, his daughters at some point.
And,
stories that he didn’t ever give them any money and that, again, this is probably going off the rails, but it just seems like different sources would tell you different things, that Lizzie was a kleptomaniac, that Lizzie was a lesbian.
So it’s really hard to find out what’s true and what’s not because there are so many different stories and claims out there.
Yeah, when you have a mystery like this, people tend to wonder about it and then theorize about it and then publish books about it.
So we’ve got lots of different theories.
And having immersed myself in this pretty often, because I find it so interesting, you can see where they’re coming from for each theory.
It’s hard to write…
a lot of them off just because we don’t have a killer we don’t know how it happened and it’s it’s a complete mystery like either um either lizzie was a criminal genius and planned the murder so well that she got away with it or someone else was a criminal mastermind and got away with it and um
Yeah, everybody loves a murder mystery.
So lots of theories are out there.
I guess we should back up just a little bit and talk about the actual murders.
What happened?
So what was the circumstance of the murders?
Not to initially get to who was home, who wasn’t, but what do we know about the timing?
And I guess…
famously the method of killing yeah what we know for certain we do know the timeline and we know the most likely murder weapon and we know and we know how complicated it would have been to pull it off and not be caught um so the timeline abby the stepmother was killed at some time
Abby was killed sometime between 9.30 and 10.30 a.m. on August 4th.
And Andrew was killed the same day, sometime shortly after 11.30, is what they think.
And there’d been, like, Lizzie’s uncle, John, had been in the house previously.
It was the first time he’d stayed over in a long time.
So, like, he’s also suspect.
I can give you I mean, we all know the rhyme, right?
Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother 40 whacks.
And when she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41.
She didn’t actually give them that many whacks if she did it.
Abby Borden had 18 sharp force trauma injuries to her head and neck, mainly the back of her head and neck.
And Andrew Borden had 10 to 11 similar injuries, mostly to his face.
And everyone always remarks on the detail that one of his eyes was cut completely in two.
So that means it was definitely a very sharp instrument that was used.
And the amount of violence was what shocked everyone.
It was complete overkill in the truest sense of the word.
And this is one of those crimes where there are horrific crime scene photos.
Indeed.
I think crime scene photography was pretty new at the time.
And they were able to get photos of both Andrew and Abby.
Hallie is right.
It was brand new.
In fact, right around the time of the murders in 1892, a French police researcher named Alphonse Bertillon was completely revolutionizing forensics.
Before Bertillon,
Crime scene photos were just random chaotic snapshots.
He introduced a rigorous scientific system of biometrics, standardizing everything from the dual pose mugshot to top-down crime scene photography taken from heavy tripods with metric measurement grids placed right in the frame.
For the first time, photography wasn’t just a visual aid, it was a measurable objective scientific record.
The Borden investigation caught the very early crest of this forensic wave.
Investigators extensively photographed the bodies of Andrew and Abby exactly where they fell, and the prosecution actually used these graphic images during the 1893 trial to map out the tight physical constraints of the house for the jury.
But these photos didn’t just stay in the courtroom.
The 1890s marked the birth of sensational yellow journalism, and while the technology didn’t yet allow newspapers to print high-resolution photos directly on the front page, the press eagerly transformed the police photographs into detailed, grisly woodcut illustrations and sketches.
The public didn’t just read about the brutal scene at Fall River.
Thanks to this new era of forensic photography, they could see it.
One of my lovely listeners sent me a great postcard with the one of Andrew on it not that long ago.
Yeah, they’re very haunting images and pretty graphic too.
But at the same time, a little tricky to see some aspects of them.
But you were…
Talking about a little earlier you mentioned the blood situation and from what I’ve read, part of Lizzie’s belief that she was innocent was that the dress that she was wearing that morning didn’t have any blood on it.
And yet apparently there was a second dress that she claimed had paint on it and that she had burnt it for that reason and that that possibly could have been the smoking gun, might have had blood on it.
And I’d also heard that there was a bucket that had some blood in it and Lizzie claimed she was menstruating at the time.
So what do we know about that particular aspect?
I believe there’s a particularly scandalous claim, too, that she was naked when she performed these murders and then had gotten changed afterwards.
And I think about the clothing of the period, too, and just how long it would take a woman to… Ooh, clothing of the period.
LAUGHTER
We picked up on that one.
I didn’t intend that one.
But well done.
But the clothing of the era, let’s put it that way, that, you know, corsets and multiple layers and just how long it would take to disrobe or to get changed.
So, yeah, in all of your research, what have you uncovered that might point to her?
having been involved as regards the blood and clothing and things like that.
Well, with the, as you said about the clothing, knowing a little bit about historic clothing, there were, yeah, there was a lot of layers, but if she needed to quick change, she could have just taken the outer layer off unless the blood spatter penetrated beneath it.
Cause usually like listening to the types of fabrics that these dresses were made of, it’s like corduroy and calico.
These are all, I mean, corduroy especially is not particularly,
absorbent to my knowledge calico would be so you might have problems with blood seeping beneath the top layer unless you changed very quickly but again it would have taken time because like there’s lots of buttons there’s lots of ribbons there’s things to tie up there’s collars like corsets under corsets there’s lots of things that you’d have to put on and off so i’m not sure if she
If she killed Andrew Borden, because she was seen between the murders as well, so there would have had to be two changes of clothes.
So it doesn’t seem probable to me personally, but unless, you know, maybe he skipped some of the undergarments that day, I’m not sure.
Yeah.
Well, there’s another point, too.
How accurate do you think they were with the timing?
Because it seems like quite a big chunk of time in between the two murders.
Do you think that they were correct or do you think in those days they didn’t really ascertain that accurately?
Yeah, the accuracy is also suspect because.
They know that Abby was killed first because her blood was coagulated and her body was cold when they went up and found her.
She was actually discovered after Andrew.
And he was still bleeding freely when they found him, which means Lizzie would have had to change very quickly.
And it was Lizzie who screamed for the maid, Bridget, to come down.
like just screaming bloody murder, basically.
So they know Abby was killed first and then Andrew, but the timing in between, it’s hard to say.
There was something in the court documents that I was reading.
No, it wasn’t the court documents.
It’s this awesome book by Kara Roberts called The Trial of Lizzie Borden, where she made a comment that the police officers…
didn’t quite understand how Lizzie and many of the other witnesses couldn’t have been paying attention to the time.
Like they just, because, you know, police officers have regimented schedules.
They’re constantly checking the clock to make sure they’re on time for whatever they’re doing, or they know that you need to be paying attention to the time.
Whereas a lady of leisure, which is…
Lizzie was at the time.
She wasn’t married.
She didn’t work.
She lived at home.
She didn’t pay attention to the clock.
So a lot of the statements from the inquest, which was the first thing that was performed before the trial, they did an inquest, was the officer who was interrogating her just getting frustrated that she didn’t pay attention to the time.
And so there’s definitely some
some room there for doubt as to what happened and when.
So it sounds like that the police pretty quickly pinned their suspicions on Lizzie.
Is that just because they knew she was at home?
Was she at home at the time of the murders?
Did they confirm that?
Why was she always the primary suspect?
Yeah, so it was just her and the maid, Bridget, who were at home.
So they assume Abby was killed sometime between 9.30 and 10.30.
During that time…
In the morning?
In the morning, yep.
A brunch murder.
Brunch murder, definitely.
Let’s all do brunch murder.
Have a Bloody Mary and then… Bloody Lizzie.
A Bloody Lizzie.
I like that better, yeah.
Just have a little, a little ax.
An umbrella.
Yeah, that’s good.
Tasteful.
Yeah.
On the day, everyone had been sick the night before.
So a lot of people had been in and out of the house vomiting.
Then Andrew left at like nine o’clock to go see about his businesses.
The uncle who’d stayed the night, he also left.
So it was just Abby, Lizzie and Bridget.
Abby sent Bridget outside to clean the house windows.
And then she went to go change the sheets in the guest bedroom.
So then it’s just Lizzie.
And Lizzie gave several accounts of where she was and what she was doing during the inquest.
And a lot of it didn’t add up.
But again, she wasn’t really paying attention to the time.
So she may have done all of these things that she said in that time, but she couldn’t give a very good account of the order in which she did things.
Andrew came home about, I think, just a little before 11.
And Bridget had to come back inside to do the windows on the inside.
And the front door was locked, so she had to let Andrew in.
And during her testimony, she said when she let Andrew in, she heard Lizzie laugh from upstairs, which is where Abby’s body was found in the guest bedroom.
creepy but it is and the lizzie said that she was i think ironing in the kitchen or something or she said she was ironing she said she um she was in the barn later um
Well, she said she was in the barn during the time that her father was killed.
I don’t actually remember what she said she was doing when her mother, her stepmother.
Sorry, Lizzie would be very angry if I said her mother.
She was constantly correcting people to say, no, that’s my stepmother, which is when suspicion actually fell on her.
Because the police were like, you should be crying and upset and you are so calm and you are correcting me that this is your stepmother.
not answering our questions at the scene of the crime.
So she had suspicion on her quite early just for because of her behavior.
But so her mom was killed sometime pretty soon after Andrew Borden left is the assumption.
Um, so Bridget is outside.
Bridget comes back in.
Bridget hears Lizzie laugh from upstairs and then come down and speak to her father.
So between murders, she did come downstairs and talk to her father and no one noticed anything amiss about her clothes or how she was acting.
Her dad comes home.
She tells him, Lizzie tells Andrew that Abby received a note from a friend and went out to go visit her friend.
And then Andrew goes to take a nap on the couch.
Bridget, who’s still not feeling very well, goes up to her room, which is in the attic, to have a nap.
And Lizzie is the only one awake in the house at this point.
She told the police she went out into the barn to look for some fishing sinkers.
She said she’s looking for irons to put on her fishing rod because she was going for a fishing trip in a few days, I think.
And then I think that was just 11-ish.
And then at about 11, sometime between 11 and 11.15, she starts screaming, calling for Bridget to come downstairs and telling her someone’s killed father.
And the doors had all been locked.
There’s there wasn’t really any way that someone could have come and gone without running into either of the ladies, really, which is why everything sort of came down quickly to Lizzie.
Right.
Yeah.
It’s just such a complicated case.
And it seems like there are so many loose ends and it’s missing information.
And you mentioned, Hallie, earlier that the family were feeling sick.
So I don’t know if Lizzie was sick as well, but that the stepmother and the father were sick.
And so was Bridget.
And wasn’t…
Didn’t it come to light that Lizzie had gone to a local pharmacist, chemist, and tried to purchase prussic acid?
I don’t know exactly what that is, so perhaps you can tell us about that.
But that she tried to get some kind of poison.
What do we know about that?
Was that true?
It is true that she went into a chemist.
The day before the murder, she went to the chemist and asked to buy prussic acid, which is cyanide.
And she told the pharmacist on duty that it was to clean her seal skin cape, which was a very expensive gift that her father had given her, possibly to mullify other tense feelings that were happening in the house, because it seems like it was wave after wave of tension in this house.
When he testified at the trial, that testimony was thrown out.
So it didn’t actually, it wasn’t presented to the jury because they thought it was too far away from the incident or didn’t have anything to do with the incident.
Was that traditionally used for cleaning, the cyanide used for cleaning clothing?
That sounds odd.
It is odd.
It’s not what it was used for.
And I don’t think anybody used it for that.
Yeah, the chemist wouldn’t sell it to her because he said, that’s poison.
I’m not giving you that.
And she left.
And that was his testimony.
She said she was never there.
Strange.
Yeah, it’s it’s everything is very confusing, like reading through Lizzie’s inquest testimony, which is the only time she ever spoke on record.
Just reading it is very confusing because she seemed in general.
confused by everything that she was asked and she wouldn’t directly answer any questions and um the go ahead sorry to interrupt i’d heard that she’d uh she’d been medicated so i was yes she was put on something uh morphine yeah yeah yeah that’s yeah that’s what i was gonna just about to say yeah she was medicated beforehand
And I wouldn’t be surprised if she was very confused.
I have no claims to deep knowledge on this case, but I did read that the prussic acid was allegedly being used to fumigate to stop moths.
Uh, so that was, that was at least one version of this I heard.
So not as a cleaning agent, but as a, uh, anti moth agent, maybe I don’t, but again, uh, it’s sketchy.
It’s sketchy stuff.
Yeah.
It’s, and it, and her saying she wasn’t there and he said she was, it was a controlled substance, the kind of the same way you can’t buy certain cough medicine now because it’s got other uses everybody knows about and they don’t want it.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And like I think a week before, Abby Borden had gone to her doctor and said she thought she was being poisoned.
Yikes.
And then again, the day before the murders, Lizzie thought she was being poisoned or she told a friend that she thought she was going to be poisoned.
Boy, that sounds such, doesn’t it?
Like maybe poison yourself just a little bit.
So everybody gets poisoned, but you don’t die.
That kind of thing.
Exactly.
That was my thought.
Maybe it’s too slow.
So maybe she came up with a better method.
That’s one of the theories.
Yeah.
She just went, okay, well, this isn’t working.
Yeah.
Time for plan B. I’ve read that they’d gotten sick on bad mutton.
So it was they used to the father wouldn’t shell out for good quality food and they used to eat mutton all the time and it was rotting or something.
And that’s what made them sick.
But yeah.
Again, so many versions, it’s really hard to piece together the truth.
Yeah, it’s not surprising it stayed a mystery because of all the contradicting statements that were made, both during the trial and the inquest.
It’s very confusing.
I get the impression that if this crime happened now…
it would be solved really fast because of DNA and other stuff.
Like it wouldn’t be that big of a mystery, but maybe I’m wrong on that.
So I don’t know.
Sorry to interrupt.
I was thinking about that and I was reading Blake, you sent Joe Nichols article on this.
Oh yeah, that’s right.
Skeptical inquirer.
And he spoke about how all nowadays for all of these reasons, we.
DNA evidence, we would find the answers.
And then I just thought about the JonBenet Ramsey case here in Boulder, Colorado.
Oh, yeah.
And just how the cops kind of stuffed that one up.
And so I thought, well, I could see today, you know, things going awry and not being able to get to the bottom of something just with…
things not being contained properly.
So, I mean, the kind of thing still happens today.
Well, it does.
And I think one of the biggest challenges is that if the victims of the crime, or if the participants in the sort of crime ecosystem, I’m not sure what you call that whole thing there with all the potential suspects and the victims.
If there’s money, lots and lots of money,
it turns out that complicates things in the courts quite a bit.
In the JonBenet Ramsey case, it’s like the evidence…
It was like the whole thing was complicated by how much money was at play, it seems like to me.
And it seems like maybe this too, that wealthy people or people who potentially might inherit a big pile of money suddenly have legal means available that aren’t there for…
Poor schlubs like me who just can’t get away with murder.
No matter how hard I try.
You’re definitely right there.
She had an amazing lawyer.
Like she, her lawyer was like an ex governor of Massachusetts who had a silver tongue and he was able to make any witness that came up on the stand feel very comfortable before tearing them apart.
Like he was good.
And she, like, with the inquest that was held for her, she was interviewed, but she wasn’t allowed to have her attorney present.
And so they had to throw that out.
So they couldn’t use her only statements in court.
This big shot lawyer that she had was really good at getting certain evidence excluded, like the prussic acid incident.
Well, I’m curious about something else.
It seems like during the trial that Lizzie had the public on her side, that they were very sympathetic to her losses and what had happened to her, and they thought she was this kind of socialite and this religious…
character went to church every week and it was just well known in the community she couldn’t have possibly done it and then afterwards it seems like the the public and the community really turned against her uh do we we know why do you think it’s just she was stigmatized afterwards or uh do you think that the community might have known more than we know today
Well, her behavior changed after she was acquitted.
Her behavior changed dramatically.
Beforehand, she went to church a lot.
She supported lots of charities.
She taught Sunday school.
She lived quite an ascetic lifestyle, I think mostly because her father had his hand on the purse strings, you know, so she couldn’t spend.
And afterwards,
She and her sister moved into a mansion in the biggest, like the biggest mansion in the affluent area of town.
She stopped supporting her charities.
She started throwing parties.
She made friends with actresses, which like at the time was like a scandal.
And she just started behaving very differently.
And she wouldn’t speak about the trial.
And…
It’s not…
I think what happened was the people doing the newspaper reporting who were in the courtroom were very supportive of her.
And they couldn’t believe that a well-bred Christian woman like Lizzie could have killed her father and stepmother.
Because they were all kind of from that upper echelon.
But the regular folks…
were like, if that was me and I was on trial, I would have been, you know, condemned.
So there was a lot of like a class division between who supported her and who thought she did it.
And the newspapers were just spitting out story after story, like trying to both support and tear her down.
There was, I think, one
newspaper story that was a complete hoax that was talking about how Lizzie was pregnant and her father and mother were threatening to turn her out of the house if she didn’t reveal the man who got her in trouble and then she killed them to get the money and then there was another one that was like talking about how her uncle and her planned together to get rid of them and
It was just story after story, just really smearing her character.
And then afterwards, with the change of behavior, all of her friends and her sister, in fact, just left.
She’d moved into that big house with her sister.
And then eventually her sister completely abandoned her and they never saw each other again.
Was that because they got an inheritance and she was of independent means?
I’m not sure what… Well, they got the inheritance because…
They actually got an extensive inheritance because when… Because of the order of the murders, Abby was killed first and she left everything to Andrew.
Then Andrew was killed.
So everything went to Emma and Lizzie.
So both of their, I mean, I’m not sure that Abby had much, but everything went to Lizzie and Emma.
And nothing went to Abby’s family, though Lizzie and Emma did pay them something, like, eventually.
But they got a lot of money.
They moved to this big house.
And then…
Suddenly they fell out and Emma just left.
And they never spoke about why, neither of them.
And it was like this big public secret.
Wow.
Yeah, again, it just really seems like there’s so much that we don’t know.
Lots of missing information, but certainly ample motivation for Lizzie to have committed these crimes.
But at the same time, I think that the idea of the uncle being a suspect is interesting because he hadn’t been on the scene for a long time and suddenly…
Out of the blue, he comes back into their lives.
And I’d heard claims of an illegitimate son as well.
So I just don’t know.
Lizzie missed out because she could have written a book called If I Did It, and that would have really cleaned up.
That would have been smart.
I wish she had because that would answer so many questions.
I just wonder if we can turn to the paranormal side of this just for, I guess, in closing because –
I mean, this is certainly one of those true crime stories, cold case that a lot of people have discussed, you know, ad nauseum before us.
And so being monster talk, I think it’d be fun to just kind of delve or interesting to delve into just some of the paranormal claims because I believe nowadays the house has been turned into a B&B and that they have ghost tours.
Yeah, D&B is the dead and breakfast, so.
Yeah.
Pretty gruesome, but, yeah, what do you know about the claims that people make about paranormal sightings and things that take place in the house today, supposedly?
Well, it is a dead-end breakfast, and they do have tours.
They have…
murder history dinners now uh i think the house was bought recently by a ghost hunting company i think um i’ve heard that yeah
The Borden house has worn a lot of hats since 1892. After Lizzie and Emma sold it in 1918, it passed through a string of owners and spent decades as a working business address – from 1948 to 1995 it was home to Smart Advertising, a local printing company. When the family behind that company died in 1996, the property was inherited by granddaughter Martha McGinn and a longtime employee, Ron Evans, and that same year they opened it to the public for the first time as a bed-and-breakfast and museum. For a long stretch Fall River regarded the Borden legacy with a kind of quiet civic embarrassment, but the house leaned into it, and tourism gradually turned the murder site into one of the city’s signature draws.
Then in May of 2021, the place entered its current era when it sold for two million dollars to Lance Zaal, founder of the nationwide paranormal-tourism company US Ghost Adventures. Under that ownership the house has gone all-in on the paranormal marketplace – overnight stays, historical tours, nightly ghost tours, murder-history dinners, and overnight ghost hunts – and yes, you can book the very guest room where Abby was killed.
That corporate approach has also rubbed up against the neighbors. When a coffee shop called Miss Lizzie’s Coffee opened next door in 2023, US Ghost Adventures sued over its name and bloody-hatchet logo and asked a federal court to make them stop. On that question, the courts sided with the coffee shop – twice. A judge declined to block the shop in 2023, finding little real risk that anyone would confuse a coffee counter with an overnight ghost tour, and pointing out that nobody gets to own the historical Lizzie Borden story itself. A federal appeals court upheld that in November of 2024. So the company couldn’t force a name change.
Where it went sideways for the cafe was everything that came after. The owner parted ways with his lawyers, started representing himself, missed a pile of court deadlines, and by early 2026 had been found in default – which now has US Ghost Adventures asking a judge for something like a quarter of a million dollars. And then, in a twist that has nothing to do with the ghost company at all, the cafe’s own landlord moved to evict it. So the shop has announced it’s leaving Second Street – relocating, fittingly, to a former church where Lizzie Borden herself once taught Sunday school. The turf war is ending, just not for the reason you’d expect.
Like it’s still operating as a bed and breakfast, which is sounds like a lot.
That’s a lot going on in the house.
And I have this thing about people ghost hunting in hotels is you’re never going to catch anything because there’s always so many other people around.
Any evidence that you collect is going to be suspect because someone else could have moved something or coughed or pushed something or turned on water that made plumbing Creek.
Like there’s no way to properly like scientific method ghost hunt in any type of hotel.
And this is a small house with, I think they’ve added two rooms in the basement and three rooms in the attic.
And it’s,
you’re not getting a suite either.
There’s like shared bathrooms, which is great, I guess.
It seems a bit crowded to me.
Was that a Jack and Jill type thing, right?
I think that’s what they call it in America when you have two bedrooms that are joined together with a bathroom in the middle.
Yeah.
Sorry, that was something I learned recently while watching a movie with my wife.
That’s interesting.
That’s cool, yeah.
That’s what that was called.
That’s neat.
But the website for the Lizzie Borden house says it’s America’s most haunted house located in Fall River, Massachusetts.
That’s very specific.
I don’t know many other houses in Fall River that would be haunted.
So I don’t know.
Yeah, I mean, that makes me wonder if the house that Lizzie purchased afterwards, if there aren’t claims associated with that, too.
Yeah, I haven’t heard anything about – I think it’s called Maplecroft is the house that they bought up on the hill.
And I haven’t been to either.
Have either of you been?
No.
I haven’t.
You know, I’ve had a lot of people ask me over the years, why haven’t you investigated this house?
And I think because I just didn’t view it as being a very kind of, I guess, salient –
paranormal claim um yeah that certainly people say uh oh there there are ghosts in in the place and i haven’t been there myself but yeah it’s just not kind of canonical paranormal for me
Yeah, I haven’t been either.
And I actually haven’t heard like any similar to the actual case.
I haven’t heard any consistent claims of specific ghost activity either.
I know the ghost hunters, the original sci-fi channel ghost hunters, Jason and Grant, went there in like 2006 and they didn’t catch anything.
They didn’t see anything.
They said it’s not haunted.
And I think a lot of people assume that the house was haunted because of the horrible things that happened there.
And I feel like… Like Amityville?
Yeah, like the incident ends up haunting the place and the ghost stories come after that.
I feel.
Yeah.
Then the, the tour, the ghost tours, like official ghost tours weren’t actually offered until 2004.
The ghost hunters visit in 2006.
And I think.
I think I read Joe Nichols’ article as well, and he said that the ghostly presence is mostly due to personal feelings of people who visit and learn about it and then are actually in the space and can better imagine what happened, and so people get haunted by the incident.
I think that’s what he said.
I think…
There’s been, we’ve talked about this a lot recently because we’ve been kind of revisiting some ghost cases.
And we have psychologists like Chris French and Richard Wiseman looking into the root causes.
Like, is it the environment?
Is it infrasound?
Is it electromagnetic waves?
Like all these different things.
And it…
at the end of the day, if you have an inclination to the paranormal and someone primes you with a setting that is spooky, creepy, based on a true story, those things, I think that has more to do than anything else than any external, you know,
The kind of place that would be haunted if places would be haunted.
I agree.
And it’s like, I just, that’s such a more powerful impactor on this stuff, I think.
And so if you go to a place that is a true crime place, literally owned by a company called U.S. Ghost Adventures.
Yeah.
It seems like that you’re naturally selecting for a higher propensity of incident or story.
Definitely.
But I am a stinking dirty skeptical person and a known fun ruiner.
But don’t you want to believe I would love to see a ghost?
I just haven’t.
I’ve tried and I haven’t.
Yes, absolutely.
We’ve tried.
Yeah.
When I thought I was being haunted in those times, except for in the immediate terrifying phase, it was fascinating.
If you’re not literally scared out of your mind, it’s really cool to contemplate and try to figure out how to get to the bottom of it.
So, yeah, absolutely.
We’ve just always found natural explanations for these claims and phenomena.
Yeah.
So, yeah, nothing yet.
We’re keeping open minds, aren’t we?
Absolutely.
And, of course, you can’t exclude maybe it’s not a ghost, maybe it’s a demon, you know.
Exactly.
Poltergeist.
Yeah, definitely a poltergeist.
But but this is a leprechaun.
Well, this is this reminds me this time of like photography is coming into play.
And the media is really big into this.
This is not too long after the the the Whitechapel murders with Jack the Ripper.
Yeah, they actually did think Jack the Ripper had come to America was one of the headlines, I think, that I read.
Oh, that’s interesting.
Yeah, I just I feel like.
And even this goes back to the Beast of Chez Vidal, and we talked about that, the rise of tabloid newspapers, broadsheets.
When there’s media to carry the story, then there’s an ecosystem there that will feed back on itself.
So I think…
it was almost destined to become a big news story for a lot of, I mean, this would play big now.
I mean, it’s, it’s not, I mean, it’s got affluent, you know, upper middle-class people with crimes and suspicions and rumors.
It’s got everything we need, you know?
That’s basically why it’s just such a popular case.
Yeah.
That it’s just got everything.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, just so long afterwards, it’s still, but people are just fascinated with this case.
Yeah, it’s got scandal.
It’s super violent.
It’s unsolved.
And everything was very public.
So like, what more do you need to create lasting public interest?
Yeah.
Do we know which PR firm came up with the rhyme about Lizzie Borden took an ax?
Because that was brilliant, right?
Kids started singing it as like a jump roping rhyme.
Oh, golly.
Yeah.
And then the papers printed it and it went like national.
I mean, I would say that like the Freddy Krueger rhyme is clearly homage to this rhyme, you know?
For sure.
Well, we didn’t grow up with it in Australia.
I don’t remember hearing it until I came here.
To the US.
Okay.
But it might have migrated to Australia.
But did you jump rope, Karen?
Did you jump rope?
Not very much, I’ll be honest.
I’m not a rope jumper.
But, yeah, well, gee, do you have any other questions, Blake, before we wrap up?
No, I mean, this was a really nice introduction to a really nasty story.
So we appreciate you coming on the show, Hallie, and talking with us about it.
Yeah, it is.
It’s such an interesting case, but we do want to be sensitive to this kind of story.
We don’t really tend to talk about true crime because we tend to…
to have our sensitivity with the victims uh and we do and and and you know it’s like a lot of these cases it’s the murderer or the suspect that gets all the fame and then who remembers andrew and abby you know that’s um but uh that that’s i i at least their names are preserved and you know that it’s just it’s um
They may not have been terribly nice people.
Maybe.
Yeah, I don’t know.
All right.
Well, Hallie, you said you’ve listened to the show before, so you should know what’s coming next.
As a first-time guest, we’d like to finish up with our signature question, which is, and this is how you define it, but what is your favorite monster?
I had to think pretty hard because I love folklore.
It’s one of my favorite things to read about.
And I decided to go with the Leshen.
Go on.
The Witcher version of the Leshen.
It’s a big, hulking forest spirit with a deer’s skull for a face.
And it guards the forest.
It controls plants.
It can call on wolves.
And if you’ve played The Witcher, it’s quite a formidable enemy in The Witcher 3, the game.
And it combines two of my favorite things, which are skeletons and plants.
Where is it found?
I’m not, I think the original…
folklore is um well the author’s polish yeah i think it’s kind of in that area the polish uh german uh sort of uh eastern european type folklore and i know the the regular non-witcher version of the lesson it’s just kind of a little tree spirit that plants trees and
looks out for the forest.
It’s not this big, hulking, spooky creature.
But I like the big, hulking, spooky creature.
I was going to say, the Witcher series…
We’ve discussed on the show before, Perlmutter, David Perlmutter talked about it.
It was one of his favorites.
And I’ve actually read the first couple of books and really liked the way he does twists on the folklore.
Yeah, I love the books.
But the games are their own thing.
I mean, like the games are extraordinarily popular and they really do play a lot in this folklore space.
And that is a very creepy looking monster.
Well, I’m wondering, is it male, female, both, neither, genderless?
I’m not sure.
I’ll put a link in the show notes.
You can check that out for an image, Karen.
Well, a funny thing.
The the Wendigo is also sometimes depicted in a similar way to the election.
Yeah, that’s a new thing.
But yeah, you’re right.
I don’t know where that comes from, because the Wendigo is like kind of a cannibal zombie type.
It is.
There is an entire I don’t know what you would call it exactly, but it’s a.
I’m really I ought to have a good term for this, but there’s an ecosystem that happens online and social media, specifically in art spaces where people are redefining what monsters are by their representation of these monsters in art.
And it’s it’s having such a big impact, which, again, that’s one of my go to themes is how.
pop culture and fiction and movies change the way people experience monsters in real life.
Yeah, the exorcist effect type thing.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
And the way these monsters are being redefined changes what people actually experience when they encounter them.
So now people who report a Mothman sighting are not reporting an armless, you know, owl, bird-looking thing.
They’re seeing a humanoid with arms and legs, you know,
And that probably has more to do with the artwork on the original book and in the statue that’s in Point Pleasant now.
So I think this is another one of those cases where you have the folklore of the Wendigo, which is a spirit of a cannibal.
It’s a possession story about how doing a taboo action can lead you to a really bad place and losing your humanity.
But now it’s also a sort of boneheaded antlered humanoid monster in, you know, in art spaces online.
It’s like I we you can’t control.
the evolution you can’t right exactly you can’t you can’t all you can do is observe it right i mean you could try to have an impact but you can’t you can’t know what’s going to take off and what’s not and and that whole image of the wendigo has become a huge pop culture uh it’s changed the iconography of the monster for sure yeah yeah it’s it’s fascinating to watch how these things change
Yeah, I think, whoops, you pressed one of my buttons.
I was like, rant unleashed, rant unleashed.
Sorry, but I do think about this all the time.
So, yeah.
He’s strange like that.
But this is a very cool monster.
Thank you, Hallie, for joining us.
And we have so much in common, so we’re going to have to keep in contact and bring you back on the show to talk about something else.
Yes, please.
Well, Hallie, thanks so much.
Thank you for having me.
This has been awesome.
Very, very cool.
Well, it’s been really fun.
Yeah, thank you so much.
Yeah, you take care.
We’ll chat soon.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard an interview with Hallie, the host of the Morbid Curiosity podcast, discussing with us the sensational 1892 Borden murders.
I hope you’ll forgive me, but when I was putting the show together, I started to get frustrated.
This is one of the rare cases where I have a really strong feeling that despite the uncertainty often expressed by the true crime community, I personally could not stop feeling that Lizzie Borden was guilty.
In particular, it was her extremely suspicious attempt to buy cyanide that knocked me off the fence.
This was the stuff they kept locked up, and it certainly was not a common household item for taking care of moths.
It was so dangerous that the druggist balked at the very idea of selling it to her because it would have been easy for her to accidentally cause her own and others’ demise.
But her lawyer managed to get the whole incident removed from consideration so the jury did not have that critical evidence to weigh when they made their decision.
Combined with the clear motive and the means, it’s just too much for me.
But I’m not here to say everyone should agree with me.
It’s just my take on a mystery that lots of people have very strong opinions about.
And mulling this stuff over is one of the reasons true crime is such a popular genre.
I told Karen about this that I felt compelled to comment and asked her if she wanted to add her own thoughts.
And she replied with the following and said that I should read it verbatim.
She did not give me permission to read her words in my barely adequate Steve Irwin impression.
But if it amuses you to do so, please feel free to hear it that way in your head.
My position is that I’m not entirely convinced Lizzie was the perpetrator, at least not beyond reasonable doubt.
The circumstantial case against her is certainly compelling, but I think there are still enough unanswered questions that I’m hesitant to treat it as settled.
If she was involved, I’ve sometimes wondered whether she may have had help from an accomplice, perhaps her sister Emma, the maid Bridget Sullivan, or even her uncle John Morris.
Morris especially has always struck me as an interesting figure given the timing of his visit.
his somewhat loose alibi, and the family financial tensions.
And he was, by trade, a butcher.
That said, none of the alternative theories is particularly conclusive either.
Ultimately, I think it’s one of those cases where we’ll probably never know for certain.
Lizzie remains the most likely suspect in many people’s eyes, but I’m not convinced the evidence completely excludes other possibilities.
And I think Hallie made her own thoughts about this uncertainty quite clear.
Plus, she has her own well-produced show, and I will put a link to that remastered episode of Morbid Curiosity in the show notes.
Have a listen.
You probably have your own opinions, so please feel free to discuss your theories at our Facebook group or over at our Patreon site.
We’d love to see and participate in such discussions.
Just, as always, try to keep those conversations polite.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of Monster Talk.
Each episode, we strive to bring you the very best in monster-related content with a focus on bringing scientific skepticism into the conversation.
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I forgot to ask Hallie if it was possible that maybe Bigfoot was behind these murders.
Sure, it may sound a little bit silly, but the big guy really does not have a good alibi.
So that is something to think about.
As you said, something silly to think about.
This has been a Monster House presentation.

The post 🪓 S05E37 – The Lizzie Borden Murders appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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The Chinnery Backseat GhostA skeptical look at one of the most famous ghost photographs ever taken – the 1959 “backseat ghost” snapped by Mrs. Mabel Chinnery in Ipswich, England. This episode is distilled from a recent MonsterTalk Live stream with Blake, Karen Stollznow, and special guest Matt Baxter, who brought fresh research (and one neat new idea) to a very old mystery.

It’s also a companion piece to our Newby Church Ghost coverage and the spirit-photography episode of Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers (1985), which examined the Chinnery photo alongside the Cottingley Fairies and the Newby ghost.

The case in brief– On March 22, 1959, in Ipswich, Suffolk, England, Mabel Chinnery and her husband Jim visited the grave of her recently deceased mother, Mrs. Ellen Hammell.
– As she returned to the car, Mabel used her last frame to take a candid shot of Jim sitting alone in their Hillman Minx.

Photo overlaying Mrs. Chinnery’s shot on a modern photo of a Hillman Minx.
– When the film was developed, a figure appeared in the back seat – identified by the family as Mabel’s late mother. Mabel said she saw only Jim and the car through the viewfinder.
– The story first ran in the British Sunday Pictorial (April 19, 1959) and reached US readers via the Sunday supplement Parade (June 28, 1959), which printed the photo next to an earlier image of Mrs. Hammell with the car for comparison.
– The husband’s first name, “Jim,” wasn’t made public until the 1985 World of Strange Powers episode, which featured photo experts Tim Newton and Dr. Steve Gull.

What we dug intoThe double-exposure hypothesis. The most common skeptical read is an accidental double exposure: a prior frame of Mrs. Hammell (seated indoors, say) and then a brighter frame of Jim in the car, with the film not advanced between. That would explain both her appearing after death and the famous “collar overlapping the window pillar” detail. The catch: if that’s true, the previous frame on the roll can’t have been a graveside headstone shot – which leads straight into Matt’s research.

Matt’s records check. Matt tracked down an interment list in the Suffolk Chronicle & Mercury confirming the burial (“Hamel, Ellen E, 78 years”) at the old Ipswich Cemetery, plus the plot itself (C1233). So the death, the date, and the cemetery all check out. But the plot had no headstone in 1959 – and still has none today – which complicates the “she was there photographing the gravestone” version of the story.

The location puzzle. In the uncropped frame, the background shows another vehicle, a high wall, and distant buildings that don’t obviously match the cemetery or its approach roads (no parking lot, no rows of trees). If the photo wasn’t shot at the cemetery, the whole “last frame of the roll at the graveside” framing wobbles.

Matt’s new theory. In an emotionally charged week, Mabel may simply have misremembered the order of her frames. The backseat shot could be an older photo of Jim with his mother-in-law (who liked to ride in the back so she could talk to him while he drove) – not a graveside-day double exposure at all. As Matt put it, “it’s a ghost” is a much longer bow to draw.

Why the glasses matter. If this were a genuine apparition, why is the figure wearing glasses that reflect light? Reflections are physics – light bouncing off a physical object that was in front of the lens when the shutter opened. That points to something in-camera, not a psychic “residual self image.”

The film-era window. Accidental double exposures created a unique generation of “mystery” photos in the few decades when roll film was common but cameras still let you forget to advance the frame. Anti-double-exposure improvements weren’t “ghost reduction technology” – they were about not wasting expensive film. The digital era trades those for panorama stretches, orbs, rods, and lens flare.

Photos compared along the way– The Combermere ghost (1891, Sybell Corbet) – a roughly hour-long exposure during Lord Combermere’s funeral; the leading explanation is a servant briefly sitting in the chair.
– The Wem Town Hall ghost (1995) – the “ghost girl” in the fire, later matched to a child on a 1922 postcard (see flags below).
– The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall – the classic staircase apparition.
– Billy Meier’s “alien women” – his “Asket” and “Nera” photos turned out to be Golddiggers dancers (Michelle DellaFave and Susan Lund) from The Dean Martin Show.
– Rods, orbs, and lens flare – the modern “artifacts you have to learn to recognize” school of mystery photos.

Editorial flags & correctionsCamera model. In the recording the camera is recalled as the Kodak Brownie (sometimes “Eastman-Kodak Brownie”) – and even that is only “some sources say.” No contemporary source we found pins down the exact model, so treat the camera ID as unconfirmed.

Wem Town Hall photographer. It was Tony O’Rahilly, who photographed the Wem Town Hall fire on November 19, 1995, and maintained the image was real until his death in 2005. In 2010, Shrewsbury reader Brian Lear matched the “ghost girl” to a child in a 1922 Wem postcard reproduced in the Shropshire Star – the now-standard debunking. (A backyard re-shoot is one way such a fake could be staged, but the documented match is to that 1922 postcard image.)

The mother’s name and dates. Rendered variously as Hammell / Hammel / Hamel / Hamill across retellings; Find a Grave lists “Ellen Elizabeth Hammel” (d. March 15, 1959), and the Suffolk interment list reads “Hamel, Ellen E, 78 years.” Parade dates the grave visit to March 22, “a week after her burial,” so “died a week before” tracks to the burial, with death a few days earlier. Spelling and the exact death-vs-burial dates stay a little fuzzy across sources.

Open questions (per our usual skeptical caveats)– If it’s an accidental double exposure, why does only the collar/window-pillar edge overlap, and why is the composition so well centered? (Raised in the live chat – left open.)
– If the background isn’t the cemetery, where – and when – was the photo actually taken?
– With no headstone in 1959 (or now), what exactly was Mabel photographing at the graveside, if anything?

Books mentioned– The World of the Unknown: Ghosts (Usborne) – the iconic childhood book Karen read from
– Mysteries of the Unknown: Hauntings (Time-Life Books, 1989) – carried the photo

References & further reading– Deep-dive case write-up (Garth Haslam): Anomalies: Mabel Chinnery’s Strange Photograph
– Spirit photography (Wikipedia)
– Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers (Wikipedia)
– Cottingley Fairies (Wikipedia)
– Wem Town Hall ghost (Skeptical Inquirer)
– Billy Meier (Wikipedia)
– Electronic voice phenomenon (Wikipedia)
– Rupert Sheldrake / morphic resonance (Wikipedia)
– Blake’s old write-up from Internet Archive

Images on screen during the streamThe Chinnery photo as printed in The World of the Unknown: GhostsSteve Gull and Tim Newton examine the photo digitally in 1985. A shoulder or chair artifact is arrow-enhanced.Apple Maps view of Old Ipswich Cemetery + plot C1233Ellen Elizabeth Hammel – 1881 – 1959
Old Ipswich Cemetery
C, 12, 33
You can use a browser and drive around the cemetery area. It does not closely match the background in the uncropped Chinnery photo.

Comparing Wem Town Hall ghost to photo of 1910 postcard girl.– Uncropped original (Getty): Mabel Chinnery behind the camera
– Full World of Strange Powers episode: YouTube

CreditsHosted by Blake Smith and Karen Stollznow, with special guest Matt Baxter.

MonsterTalk theme music by Peach Stealing Monkeys.

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My wife took the photo at the gravesite, and when we got down to the car, I got in the car, she said, wait a minute, she said, I’ll finish this film off.
And she took my photo, and that was the finish of that.
When I looked through the viewfinder, all I saw was Jimmy in the car and snapped it, and that was that.
Didn’t think no more about it.
But there in the photograph was this unmistakable figure.
Well, I took it and showed it to somebody and they said, it’s your mother in the back.
And I said, don’t be so stupid.
But she was there.
Well, I could see it was my mother, of course.
I could see it was her.
The most extraordinary thing about this is that she always used to sit on that side of the car when she was out with me so that she could talk to me and see me as I was driving.
Jim remembers his mother-in-law’s last words.
She said, Jim, she said, you’ll never come to any harm.
She said, I shall still be with you.
It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24-mile long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland, it’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
That clip in our intro was from Episode 7 of the 1985 TV series Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers.
We’ve mentioned this episode before because it covers the Cottingley Fairies as well as the Newby Church ghost, and the subject of today’s episode, the backseat ghost photo taken by Mrs. Mabel Chinnery in 1959.
The following discussion…
is a distillation from our recent Monster Talk Live coverage on this topic.
Discussing ghost photos on a podcast has a bit of a visual challenge to it, but if you check the show notes, I’ve included images that were on screen during the YouTube streaming, so that if you’re able to check those out, they may prove illustrative to the content of our discussion.
As normal for a Monster Talk Live, we’re joined by Karen’s husband, Matt Baxter.
And I have to say, Matt brought up a really interesting idea that I hadn’t considered on this case, but it fits so neatly into the mystery surrounding it, I’ll leave it for him to reveal during the conversation.
The full, original conversation will be available on our YouTube channel, but I’ve tightened this up for podcasting.
Monster Talk
But welcome, everybody.
This is Monster Talk Live, and I am Matthew Baxter.
I’m Blake Smith.
I’m Karen Stollznow.
Welcome.
Get yourselves a drink, and let’s get into talking about the Chinnery backseat ghost.
So, Karen, I know you were talking about, you know when you first heard of this.
Yes.
I don’t know about everybody else.
I believe, Matt, you have a photograph.
So we have talked about this book before.
So another used-born, us-born book, I guess, depending on where you come from.
So this is the one that Blake, we discussed this book in an episode many moons ago.
He’s, I think, frantically looking for the picture here.
Frantic.
I’m frantic.
So first off, this is the image.
Yeah, I think this is the bad guy.
To start with this image, because it is so iconic, it is so famous, it’s now known as the Chinnery ghost or the backseat ghost.
But when I first found out about this, and this is probably around maybe 1980, I didn’t think it had a name.
It was just a ghost photograph.
And to me, it looked like a London cab or something.
Yeah, a little bit, yeah.
I know, Blake, you’ve looked into that.
We’ve all looked into this now, and it’s a, what, a Hillman?
Hillman Minx, yeah.
And, yeah, I believe my brother had a Hillman at one point.
So I don’t know, is that a car that you can find in this country, like that brand?
That’s a British import.
You won’t see many of those here in the States.
Beautiful, beautiful old car.
I had a Ferret, but I never had a Minx.
So, yeah, have you got the picture of the book?
There we go.
So the world of the unknown ghost.
So we spoke about this very lovingly a couple of years ago with one of the authors.
And it’s such an iconic book and this is such an iconic photograph and has been touted as one, I guess, the gold standard evidence for ghost photography.
And it is just brilliant.
very well known.
And even if people don’t know the name of it, they still know that picture.
They’ve seen it before.
And again, like part of our series of things that scared the crack out of us as kids.
So here is the image from the book.
And I just wanted to read.
This little story that’s attached.
Because it’s not readable on the screen.
It’s not, no.
So this is my first encounter with this image.
This picture is one of the most puzzling ghost photographs ever taken.
The woman in the back seat was supposed to be in her grave when the photograph was taken.
The driver’s wife took this picture of her husband sitting in the car.
She claims that there was nobody in the car except her husband.
Yet the photograph clearly shows the figure of a woman, her mother, who had died a week before.
Experts say that the film has not been altered in any way.
Yet if you look closely, you’ll see that the corner of her scarf seems to overlap the side pillar of the car.
This would only be possible if her face was placed in the picture after it was taken.
Yet if the experts are correct and the photograph is genuine, there is no explanation.
That’s astonishing that they included that detail back then.
No explanation for how it could have happened.
That is, unless the woman in the back…
was a ghost.
So there we go.
So that’s the first encounter I had with this case, and they did not mention names or places.
So I think what we find online today is typical of urban legend and folklore.
We find the same story again and again, repeated with the same names and dates.
and places, but it’s all very murky, really.
All we have left is this photograph and just the repetition of folklore.
Well, and oftentimes with these stories, as they start to grow, new details will be added to the story that sound like they’ve been there the whole time.
but when you go back and actually look at the previous versions, they’re not there.
So it’s an accretion of information.
But yeah, I do love this story.
And I have to say, it falls into the bucket, the basket of stories where, look, I don’t think this is a ghost, but it’s creepy, but I cannot explain it.
So I’m really relying on the good research of my two friends here.
And Matt has done some really wonderful work
research for this and discovered some things that I never knew.
I’ve done a little bit of digging here and there, but he really has done some great work here.
So I’m excited for him to share the things that he’s found.
Well, I want to start off by saying I cannot remember where I first saw this picture.
My memory is like, oh, it was in one of those time-life books.
Yeah.
But I don’t have any of those anymore, so I would have to rely on you, Blake, because I know you do.
What’s kind of the story here?
How did this happen?
The photo, as it’s usually presented, there’s a few different versions, I should clarify.
But the important thing is that this is Mabel Chinnery’s husband and mother.
Mabel is at the cemetery with her husband to visit the grave of the mother who just died a week ago or so.
This is what drives me crazy.
There’s more than one version of this story.
But the most frequent one is that…
She had one or two more shots on the roll and went ahead and shot a photo of her husband sitting in the car.
And that’s problematic, if true, because of stuff that we shouldn’t spoil right yet.
But that’s the story.
So her mother is definitely dead.
They’re at the cemetery.
And then her mom shows up in the backseat of the car.
That’s the main story.
Well, I think that’s what makes the story so compelling is because of the recent demise of her mother.
And it just seems like it’s a very earnest story.
This looks like an older couple themselves.
Why would this be a hoax?
Why would they make this up?
So, yeah, there’s the picture.
It’s so creepy.
It looks like…
I will admit the first time I saw the picture, I thought it was a fellow in the back seat.
I thought it was a man.
That’s not your mother.
It’s a man, baby.
Now, often this is shown next to an image of Mabel’s mother, which does lead you to, and here we go.
So sometimes she is unnamed, sometimes she’s Mabel’s mother, and sometimes Mrs. Ellen Hamill.
So we have that name to kind of, we had that name to look into.
But, yeah, so if you look at them side by side, I think there’s a little bit of priming there, a little bit of, oh, I can see that face mapping onto that image, the initial image.
But it’s…
It’s a little tricky to really see any kind of detail.
Absolutely.
One of the things is they say that it could be a reflection on the window, but it looks like he’s got his window down.
He does, yeah.
And so I don’t think it’s a reflection.
They often say that, oh, you can see on the left there that the collar is overlapping the edge of the window frame.
I don’t think it is.
It always looks like a cravat to me, that it was a fellow wearing a cravat.
Yeah, yeah.
Again, I don’t know when we want to get into this, but part of this, this was like one of the subject matters of Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers episodes.
And I love that episode because they’re using, I think, a PDP-11 to do digital analysis in 1980.
four something like that uh so it’s it’s some early days for digital analysis but uh um maybe i’ll hold off on what they found but uh shouldn’t we add here that that was the same episode uh that looked at the newbie
church ghost and also the Cottingley fairies.
But we’ve kind of been hitting on a bunch of these ghost photos and this is such a chilling one in some ways.
And the people involved in the photo seem pretty earnest.
Like they don’t seem like…
you know, like glamorous or attention grabbing or anything like that.
So I think they come in all the interviews I’ve seen with them, they’ve come across as like, wow, this crazy thing happened, you know?
So, yeah.
Yeah.
It is, it’s a spooky situation to say the very least, but you know, there are some, there’s a, there’s a lot of unknowns in this whole thing, but there’s a lot of things aren’t,
backed up, you know, immediately, such as, let me see here if I can share this real quick again.
So let’s go back to them.
And we’ve got…
where was the cemetery exactly?
Which cemetery was it?
And all these stories, they don’t specify.
And did Mrs. Hamill actually die the week before?
Is there proof that she died a week before?
And that now they’ve had a funeral and they’re taking pictures.
So I’ve seen a number of articles too where Jim, the husband, had talked about Mrs Chinnery’s mother, his mother-in-law, and how close they had been and said that she had uttered final words to him.
And those final words were, Jim, you’ll never come to any harm.
I shall always be with you.
So I think that that’s the kind of backstory, whether she’d actually said that or words to that effect.
Or not.
That’s the back story to say, well, she was still being chauffeur-driven around like he was Jeeves.
And there she is in the back seat.
And also part of the story is that she liked to sit in the back seat.
She liked to be chauffeur-driven.
So that is where she would sit.
So it’s only logical that her ghost, her spirit would still be in the back seat there.
Makes sense.
It does.
I did some digging around.
and looked far and wide trying to find some of this mystery information.
And I did find this old newspaper, the Suffolk Chronicle in Mercury.
And as you can see, a man was fatally attacked by a prized bull.
Hit in the face by a pellet.
But on this page, you don’t see anything about any death notices or anything like that.
But if you look over on the adjoining page that was not scanned fully, you see that there’s a little bit of a list there.
And when you look at that list, you can find March 18th, Hamel, Ellen, E, 78 years.
That’s internments in Ipswich Cemetery.
So she existed.
So that was accurate.
That was her name.
So we found the cemetery.
We found the fact that she did die when they stated she died.
So all this is true.
So you can read that even better there.
Which, of course, doesn’t prove that that is a photograph of a ghost.
Yes, it does.
But it certainly is interesting to be able to look into this and to see what’s fact, what’s fiction.
But, yeah, so old Ipswich Cemetery, Suffolk, England, and, yeah, to even find her plot.
the exact location and it’s rather sad for me because she’s one year younger than my mother was when she passed last year so
Yeah, this hits me personally.
Hearing this story, I want to believe, and it almost feels like they were looking for some kind of evidence of life after death and some kind of grief hallucination.
Incredibly emotionally charged.
I have a lot of empathy for this couple and for this case and can see why this does appeal to so many people.
So the big story is that she was there taking pictures of the headstone and stuff like that.
Now, when she was there, it would have basically been a week after she died.
And the odds are there wouldn’t have been a headstone.
That’s a good point.
There would have been a burial mound.
And at that time, there were a lot of graves that didn’t ever get headstones.
But you can see right there the plot.
It’s C-12-33.
So if we look, you can see C next to WW2.
And if you zoom in on that, you can see 12 right in the center of the screen.
You zoom in on that a little closer, you can see 33.
There’s no headstone.
Mm-hmm.
Right in the middle there.
Yeah.
So that’s to this day.
So even back then, you know, as you’re saying.
That kind of masonry, they wouldn’t necessarily have that ready at that point.
But here it is today.
They still don’t have a marker, which, you know, is very sad.
But that is an intrinsic part of the story, that she was there to take photographs of the head, the gravestone.
Well, yeah, but so maybe this actually works.
Don’t cuss.
Well, just here’s the thing.
So…
We should go ahead and, I guess, bring it up that one of the most common skeptical analysis is that this is a double exposure that an accidental, if we’re being generous here, an accidental double exposure.
So the way that would work is they would have taken a picture of the mother-in-law sitting in a chair or whatever.
And then they take a second photo.
without advancing the film.
And I know in modern cameras that would never happen, but it was possible to do that here.
Yes.
Okay, so then you get two photos, one of her in the chair and one of those, I guess a much brighter lit photo of her son-in-law sitting in front of the car.
Now…
If that’s true, that accounts for the bleed over on the collar.
And it accounts for her, you know, being in the photo when she’s dead.
Other than her being a ghost.
Right, right, right.
Now, the problem is…
If those things are true, then the previous photo to this one cannot be of headstones in the cemetery.
Yes, exactly.
We have none of those photos.
Right, right.
And as you’ve just demonstrated, there should never be an ability to do those photos, even if they wanted to, because a headstone never materialized.
I don’t mean that metaphysically.
Well, and when you look at find a grave.
Yeah.
There’s no headstone.
There you go.
So that sounds like a feature that was added on later.
Maybe honestly, maybe that’s how they recalled it.
But it’s part of the embellishment.
But in part of the embellishment and the best.
And we’d like to talk about presumption of sincerity with these cases.
The sincere case would be they accidentally do a double exposure.
They take this developed exposure like, holy crap.
And then they start walking the circuit talking about the photo with people.
And as they do that, the story slowly gets embellished with new features.
Maybe.
I think that would be pretty creepy to have a picture of a headstone in the backseat, in the back of the car.
Well, I mean…
That would have been better.
But you’re right.
That would be creepy if that had happened.
But, I mean, I guess there’s no evidence that that whole story of taking photos…
that’s the thing, right?
If, if not that, did they just go to the cemetery?
She looks around and she’s like, well, I’ve got the camera.
There’s no headstone.
I guess I’ll take a picture of my husband, you know?
Right.
Maybe, maybe that happened.
I don’t know.
I mean, well, I think we should go back to whether this was taken at the cemetery at all.
Let’s look in the background because I see another car and a wall.
Exactly.
So when you look at this at first and you look beyond, because we’re so used to looking at the foreground, the front, what’s happening right in front of us and not looking at the back.
And so Matt and I were taking a look at the background and thinking, well, what is that?
It’s a vehicle.
There is some kind of wall.
Is that a building or is it just a wall?
So we don’t have a definitive answer on this, but Matt did look into it a little bit further.
Yeah, let’s try a different share here real quick.
because it does get interesting.
So if I go and I look at this on Apple Maps, you can see the cemetery there, Old Cemetery.
So as I zoom in, it’s funny because where it says Old Cemetery is pretty much exactly where the grave is.
The spot, yeah.
Nice.
So you’ve got…
I don’t know what I mean.
But it makes us want to go there and to take some pictures of the location.
I really want to go there, yeah.
Right.
Like, is there actually a wall around it, right?
So, yeah, what you’re not seeing is a parking lot of any kind.
You know, it could be down here.
barnsby gardens or cemetery road road yes probably but you’re not seeing a bunch of trees you’re seeing maybe one of these houses back there but you see it somewhere where people can park on both sides of the road um to be able to uh i wish i could flip that back and forth quickly um to kind of fit now it is possible that he could have been parked over here and she had to walk
you know, through here to get to the…
But we do have roads in the cemetery too, don’t we?
And I don’t know if those are new or if those…
But there’s no parking places where one car could be on one side and another car could be on the other, like… Like in the photo.
Like in the photo.
So, and that does make it…
difficult yeah so i don’t know it’s i have a theory uh and i think it closely aligns with with yours blake but previous to this i always thought this was a hoax you know it wasn’t until i really started digging into it that i started feeling like this is not a hoax
Absolutely not.
There’s no trickery here because we can look at hoaxes.
We have our version of the brown lady.
That’s actually Karen coming down the stairs there.
But here’s the real brown lady.
And this is a hoax, regardless of what anybody says.
All the conditions that were claimed to have taken place when they took this photo don’t match up with reality.
this is a hoax.
We do have to tackle this in a future episode, too.
We will definitely talk about this in the future.
Now, we have the Lord Cumbermere photo, and this one I don’t believe is a hoax.
It could be, but I think this is…
They put this camera up and left the shutter open for an hour.
They let it expose for an hour.
Hour.
So, over here to the lower left…
Yeah, this is definitely a long exposure.
Someone comes in and sits in this chair and doesn’t realize the photo’s being taken.
Maybe looks at a book for a few minutes or whatever and gets up and walks out.
And this is exactly what you would get.
That’s the kind of photo you would get.
So it’s pretty explainable.
Can I ask for people like myself who don’t really understand double exposures and long exposures, what’s the difference between the two and why is that not at play in the Chinnery photograph?
I’m sorry you didn’t read the rules beforehand, but all questions must be submitted in writing in triplicate three weeks before the show for you to get an answer.
No, this is a situation where if the room was maybe a little dark, you know, you can see they have these big drapes and everything.
It looks like sun is shining in.
Oh, wonderful photograph.
This deserves an episode, too.
But you can see where it’s white, you know, it’s blasted out.
It’s overexposed.
Right, it got overexposed, yep.
So if you put your camera, your smartphone, in night portrait mode, it’s going to basically leave the shutter open longer so more light can get in.
And that means you have to hold very still so you don’t blur.
And this was a situation where it was open for an hour.
A long period of time.
Yeah, came in, sat down, and didn’t know he had his picture taken.
But this is still exactly the kind of place that you would expect to see a ghost.
Exactly.
And the blur fits the description of what they think the blur of Lord Cumbermere would look like.
So now we have this fun one, and I know Blake has done some looking into on this one.
Focus through this one, Blake.
The girl in the fire.
This is the Wim Town Hall photo.
Classic.
This town hall in the city of Wim burned and Tony Arahele, a local photographer, took photos.
And when he produced them, they show up with this face here.
And for a while…
People were concerned, is this pareidolia?
Is this like the end of a log that’s rested on the rail?
You know, what is this?
And for a long time, from the 90s until the, I guess, right around 2010, it was thought maybe it was maybe pareidolia or maybe a ghost.
But, you know, it’s more likely pareidolia.
That was the, again, assuming Mr. Overhealy didn’t fake anything until…
2010, when it turns out that this photograph, this old postcard got reprinted in the local newspaper and the Shropshire Star ran this as like, hey, you know, look at this cool old photo of our local community.
And one of the readers, one of the readers, not listeners, named Brian Lear.
spotted the girl in the bottom left corner.
And it’s like, that girl looks a lot like that ghost in that ghost photo.
Holy crap.
It’s her like it, like it’s a 100%.
It’s not clear here, but it is a 100% match to her.
Yeah, absolutely.
And so over healing, what he did was he had his own photography studio in his backyard.
And he basically took the photo at the fire, a series of photos at the fire.
And then he manually created this photo and reshot it on a new roll so that it appeared in sequence, right?
So he went to a lot of effort to accidentally get a ghost photo.
And I think that’s important because people forget that you don’t need to make a bunch of money on these things if you’re getting one over.
Each person has their own threshold for what they think is worth bothering with.
And Mr. O’Reilly went to a lot of work for this ghost hoax, right?
So was it for the laughs?
Was it because he knew he’d get a few bucks from media?
I don’t know.
In the UK, tabloid media will pay substantially for a good ghost photo.
Oh, yes, they will.
This is not hundreds.
It’s more like low thousands, right?
All right.
Good to know.
It’s good to know, right?
I mean, they’re not joking around if they can get exclusive rights, right?
And all you have to do is kind of have the photo and be willing to say that it was honestly created, right?
So Mr. O’Reilly went to a lot of frigging work to honestly not create this honestly.
So he…
it’s a very dishonest amount of effort to pretend like what i mean what do i know i’m just a photographer well very different to the chinnery ghost then yes yeah right mr chinnery is not a photographer like he’s not a he doesn’t have a lab in his backyard right he’s sitting he’s off to what is it sending it off to the chemist to be developed all right
So, yeah, well, have you ever seen this one?
No, I don’t think I have.
But it does look like, yeah.
Well, this is supposed to be a farm in Scotland where they kept seeing this, the ghost of this child who they believe was from medieval times.
And he would show up and they captured him on photo one time.
And a giant turkey leg and a margarita.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah, Little Surf.
And yeah, I thought the same thing.
I thought this kid looks familiar.
And so did some poking around and I’ll be darned.
Oh, it is.
It literally is Anakin.
Okay.
It literally is.
Cut to the core.
No, I did not know that.
I was just like, it looks like Anakin Skywalker.
Okay.
Well, wow.
Okay.
Yeah.
What about, I don’t think you’ve got an image of this one, but what about the one that you used to talk about in workshops and things like that?
We had an image of these, what, alien women, female aliens.
You had me at alien women.
But who did it turn out to be?
Yeah, I can tell you what it was.
It was Billy Meyer, and these were two plagiarian women, and they were all blurry and everything.
And if you looked at it long enough, you could think that, you know, wow, this could have been taken off an old TV set, you know, a TV picture, you know, because they never come out very good with the moray pattern and everything.
But no, no, Billy wouldn’t do that.
He wouldn’t hoax anything.
But if you happen to have a VHS copy of the Dean Martin Variety Hour, you could actually freeze frame on two of the smiling backup dancers that looked almost identical.
And yeah, so it’s…
You know, when you do these hoaxes, you have to be careful where you pull your material from.
Well, it might take some time, but at some point, someone is going to come across the original image if it’s out there.
But, well, we’re going to look at another picture or… Well, can we hop over to…
There was a photo as a close-up of the Chinry photo that shows the overlap between the collar and the strut in the support around the window.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
People in the chat are asking… Well, they’re making the really good point is if this is an accidental double exposure, it is an astonishingly well-framed one.
Right.
I mean, because everything is centered perfectly.
Right.
So.
Yeah.
So we’re talking about this, this sort of line right here.
Yeah.
I went into our text chat.
I don’t know if you can get that one out easily.
Well, the thing thing is about this is I’m not 100 percent sure about the.
if there was any motion at all with this, how long of an exposure it was.
But I just don’t think that this one tiny little overlap right there, when we’re talking about the degradation of…
you know, reproduction, reproduction, reproduction, if that’s really good evidence of a double exposure.
The reason I’m inclined to believe it is because in that Arthur C. Clarke episode, what they’re doing is they’re taking original photos and scanning them.
It’s really cool because as you may have recalled, I’m a nerd for old tech, right?
Right.
So they’re using a PDP-11 and a drum scanner.
So they had to like wrap…
the image around the cylinder and then rotate it through the scanning apparatus.
And so they’re using technology that they are, would use to like enhance license plates and that sort of thing.
And this is, again, this is like 1984, 1985.
So this stuff is super rudimentary, right?
I mean, you’re looking at 1984 is also the year that Macintosh becomes available.
So most computers are using strictly command line interfaces, you know, not not GUI.
Right.
So these computers were able to do on-screen video analysis, enhancing the crispness, trying to remove the contrast, that sort of thing.
And they were also using the same technology for examining the Cottingley Fairies, looking to see if they could spot any lines or threads holding up the images.
In this home office laboratory is the world’s most advanced equipment for the examination of photographs.
Using a computer, forensic experts help the police to snare criminals by enhancing photographic images to bring out hidden detail.
Today, the computer is focused on the phantoms.
The photographs are optically scanned and fed into the computer for analysis.
Tim Newton and Dr. Steve Gull begin with Gordon Cowell’s photograph.
But what about Mrs. Chinnery’s photograph?
There are some very strange things here.
This scarf definitely does pass this line here.
But further down the picture, the line is definitely in front of her.
There’s also this feature on the other side of the barrier between the two windows.
It does seem to be, as if it might be a shoulder, then that does make her a very wide person.
Perhaps the best explanation is if some mistake has happened here, some very short exposure sometime before has been superimposed upon the picture.
in that analysis, they’re taking the best copy they can get and they see that overlap.
So I think it’s probably really there in the original where that’s happening.
But you’re right.
It’s like, if this is a double exposure, why is the rest of the image not also crossing over, bleeding over?
It’s a really good question.
And for it to be accidental, again, presumption of sincerity, if it’s accidental and nobody’s pulling shenanigans, why is that the only part that overlaps?
It’s a really good question.
Well, what’s your alternative theory, Matt?
I think we can…
spring it on everyone at this point.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, just working on all this, it just kind of occurred to me that you’ve got, well, like Karen was talking earlier about, you know, how your heart goes out to these people.
This was a very emotionally charged time.
She doesn’t notice anything happening until after.
you know, going through the photos and everything else.
So at this point, she doesn’t actually, or potentially, doesn’t actually know what order the photos were in.
She may have thought, I’ve done this when I was a kid and I had a little manual camera, that I would think I took a picture when actually I didn’t.
And so I would, you know, click and then, you know, I’d try to run it forward and everything and then find out that I would have to click it again before I could run it forward or whatever.
But I thought I’d clicked it, but I didn’t click it all the way down, and therefore I didn’t take a picture.
So she could think, hey, I went out and took a picture of my husband when actually she never did.
But she might have took a picture of her husband and her mother somewhere else in that car.
a week before, and she had all the pictures kind of together in a shoebox or whatever, and she’s going through and she’s like, oh, here’s the picture of my husband.
Who’s that in the back seat?
When actually the picture was never actually taken in the order she remembers.
But it’s so emotionally charged, and she suddenly sees this picture with the ones of her taking a picture of the grave mound, or being at the cemetery.
And now she’s got this completely different narrative in her mind.
And I think there’s a couple of different levels that this answers a lot of questions.
It may seem like, wow, you’re really drawing a long bow there, but oh, it’s a ghost.
That’s a longer bow.
Well, I think this episode is out of order in that we’ve got the
newbie ghost uh newbie church ghost episode coming out in which we talk about the importance of also having the images that came before the the one in question and the images that come after uh and so without that information
it’s really difficult to know exactly what was on that film and do what came before, what came after.
And we do go into that in a lot of depth in this next episode.
So, yeah, our episodes are out in that regard.
Well, I just have to say that if this was like I think it might have been…
then if they had an expert analyze the picture and the negative, it’s going to be as authentic as you can get because it is an actual picture.
But this doesn’t look to me like it’s outside that cemetery.
Yeah.
Maybe it is.
Well, it’s interesting, too, because they’re also—
Yet another case of the photo you see is almost always cropped.
Yes.
I looked far and wide for one that wasn’t.
With the little arrow saying, look here, and the priming.
I know what they’re doing.
They’re trying to bring you into the detail where the weirdness is going on.
But in the process of doing so, they strip out the context that would help you figure out what’s actually going on in the original photo.
Right.
So that’s problematic.
It would be really interesting to do some more digging into finding out what is in the background there, because just from a preliminary search, it does not seem like that is at the cemetery.
It’s not in that area where the grave is.
Yeah.
And it could potentially be that old cemetery road or the nearby one where there are houses.
But that looks like some kind of wall.
It doesn’t really look like houses and other vehicles.
But it is really difficult to determine where that is.
It really is.
It doesn’t seem to, on the surface, completely fit in with the story that that is on the cemetery grounds.
That would be so intriguing and interesting if it turned out that it was taken somewhere different and she was alive in the backseat.
That would be really funny.
Yeah.
And that’s just…
It seems like that does answer a lot of questions without making outrageous assumptions.
Yeah.
Now, one of the things, again, sometimes when we talk about ghost photos, I guess there’s sort of an inherent…
which is that the…
photography photography works through chemistry and physics right so light bounces off of a subject matter and then makes it through the lens where back then it’s hitting a piece of film which is covered with chemicals which are photoreactive and then you have to set those into like a fixed state and then develop them and then eventually you get this image which is pretty freaking amazing um
But they’re always sketchy when it comes to saying these are potentially ghosts or the supernatural.
Right.
Because in order for them to be the supernatural, they have to themselves work with the world of physics.
Right.
So I didn’t see the thing, but the camera did.
Right.
So whatever was there, it was not part of the photo I was taking a part of.
But yet it showed up on film.
OK, well, that’s clearly not how physics works.
Right.
It’s a bit like the whole EVP thing where I recorded this room, I didn’t hear anything, but when I played it back, I heard these voices.
The reason I bring it up, because if this photo is legitimately supposed to be a ghost…
The mother-in-law is wearing a pair of glasses which have reflections of light on them, right?
So… That’s always bothered me.
Now, I know, like, people have come up with the… What do they call it?
Where you have, like, a mental concept of who you are.
Residual self-image.
He stole that from The Matrix.
Is it really so hard to believe?
Your clothes are different.
The plugs in your arms and head are gone.
Your hair has changed.
Your appearance now is what we call residual self-image.
That’s another conversation because the Matrix has bled into more paranormal stuff than it has any right to do, right?
So you’re not wrong.
If this were a ghost, why would she be wearing glasses?
Okay, well, it’s part of her…
psychometric, psychoresidual self.
Okay.
But why are they reflecting light?
That makes no sense, right?
So they reflect light because they’re a physical thing.
Whenever that photo is taken, there’s a person with glasses back there that’s reflecting light.
That’s what’s going on.
I don’t think that’s part of that sort of…
psychic resonance or whatever.
I don’t think it is.
I don’t think I’ve always heard that they’re glasses, but I think the standard story I hear is that her eyes are that she’s has demonic eyes or something like that, or, or who, you know, like a lot of the images that you have of these iconic spirit photographs where hollowed out.
So they’re
The ghost doesn’t have eyes anymore.
Like the newbie ghost last week where it’s the, you know, I see a cutout sheet and other people see a haunting skeletal visage.
Suffice to say, this has just always been one of my favorite photographs and really did…
scare the crap out of me as a kid.
And it’s just a very fun image.
I think there’s absolutely a natural explanation behind this.
And perhaps we may not have gotten to the bottom of it, but I think that some of the theories that you guys have come up with are more plausible than this being a ghost.
Unfortunately.
I’m inclined to, again, this sort of the bias of the show, I’m inclined to disbelieve in ghosts.
And if this were supposed to be evidence of such, I would… Not good evidence.
I’d like to know more about what’s up with the glasses and the reflection and all that sort of stuff.
That’s a really good question.
So, yeah.
Well, I still think it’s possible that if it is a previous photograph that’s overlapping or something like that, that it’s not even…
The mother-in-law.
The mother.
It could potentially be someone else.
That could be true, too.
I don’t know.
It’s really interesting, though.
I mean, I guess all those things are technically more plausible in my skeptical world than it’s a ghost, right?
Sure.
But it is interesting.
I want it to be a double exposure.
Like, I want that to be the plausible…
non-exploitative explanation that they just, whoops, got a double exposure.
And then it happened to fit in with this wonderful reassurance that our mother-in-law is still out there watching over us.
That’s lovely.
The backseat of the car.
Right.
Yeah, it’s a sad story.
No matter which way you look at it.
But I think whether it is a double exposure or whether there’s some other natural explanation, I don’t think it’s a hoax.
Yeah, I’d like to continue to believe that because I really, I’d like the idea that they accidentally did this and then it got out of hand.
But it fits with the normal evolution of these stories too, though, you know, where they get out of our control and they become, you know.
Morphic.
Bigger, larger than life.
Yeah.
Do we know, with the newbie church ghost, we talk about the camera and with the Cottingley fairies, we talk about the camera.
Do we have any information on what kind of camera was used?
My understanding is this actually was a Kodak Brownie.
Yeah.
Oh, really?
Cool.
Yeah.
So famous camera.
Yeah, that it is a very famous little camera.
That was what I had read.
That was the Kodak Browning.
And I did some digging in and I found another camera expert talking about.
how it was possible to accidentally get a double exposure.
There’s two, these, these cameras as different models and years came out, they, they remember we’re talking about double exposures as being a whoops, accidentally made a ghost, but what they really are is whoops.
You just ruined your photo.
Right.
So.
for the it’s a very rare circumstance where you ruin your photo and it’s also worth keeping right like so this is the the industry as a whole was trying to push away from circumstances where you could accidentally double expose your film and so these improvements were not ghost reduction technology that was a side effect right they were really about you not wasting your freaking money because it costs you time and effort to make these photos
people didn’t make a hundred photos and then keep the 12 that mattered.
Right.
Like, you know, they had to really put some thought into it because every roll of film costs a bunch of money plus developing it costs money.
Sure.
Well, I have a question just as someone who knows very little about these kinds of things in terms of double exposures, what would be a kind of standard type of double exposure that people would experience?
Yeah.
Usually, some of these older cameras, you would take the photo and your next step is supposed to be advance the film to the next photo, right?
If you forget to do that…
The camera, when it takes that next photo, will be double exposing.
That’s just what happens.
It just re-exposes the film.
Like I had one where I took a close-up of my pet box turtle.
And it was like getting ready to eat something, so it had its mouth open.
And I was just taking pictures of all kinds of little things.
And then I had a picture of a Smurf.
And it looked like this giant monster was eating a Smurf.
And it was very cool, but completely accidental.
And I’ve, I’ve seen a lot of photographs in one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, and I, I tried to take credit for it, but everybody knew that that was an accident, but yeah.
Well, I mean, it was a ghost turtle.
Yeah.
The photographic world has lost this world where accidental double exposures led to these really strange, you know, mystery photos.
The new kinds of things that happen in the digital world, they’re still weird, but they’re not as reliably explainable or as reliably mysterious.
Like, so when you’re doing a…
panorama shot and you get a weird photo of your cat where it’s like the head is here and then it’s got a giant tube body and the tail’s way over here so it looks like your cat’s nine feet long it’s the demon cat whether it’s rods or orbs or double exposure all these different phenomena i’m not finding any of them as compelling as the good old-fashioned double exposure i really i loved them
And I thought they really created a lot of cool mystery photos.
Well, I think it’s a matter, too, of people just not being familiar with that kind of older technology.
And when we talk about chupacabras and just decaying cows and things like that, people by and large aren’t familiar with these processes or old technology.
And so it just seems very magical and mysterious.
True.
It’s true.
Although we’re going to be talking about cattle mutilations real soon.
So I’m excited about that again.
There’s something to look forward to.
There’s lots of things that can cause what would be mysterious to the person not expecting to see these show up on their film or their photos, whatever that, whether it’s digital or film or otherwise, but.
Again, I’m overall skeptical of the idea that film can capture ghosts, especially if you don’t see the ghost.
If you see a ghost and take a photo, that would be the least unexpected thing, right?
Well, I saw it and I took a photo and it showed up.
That’s almost never what happens, though.
It’s the, we didn’t see anything, but when we took the photo and developed it, look what we got.
And that’s a pretty good indicator that what you’re dealing with is something that was in camera, not in real life.
Well, I think even going back to 1959, so right around the time of the newbie church ghost too, and this will all make more sense soon, but I think even going back to that time for people who weren’t really that familiar with technology, the idea that this could capture a ghost I think was more believable.
Yeah.
Not plausible necessarily, but believable.
Yeah, I agree.
I agree.
I, I, I, again, I’ve become super skeptical.
I still love looking at old ghost photos and trying to figure out what’s going on.
So.
Me too.
Love the photograph is just beautiful.
Classic.
Yep.
So thank you so much, everybody.
And thanks to the audience for participating.
That’s a great chat.
Thank you for joining us.
Good to do this.
Got to do more of these.
All right.
We’ll see all of you very soon.
Okay.
Bye.
Bye.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard a discussion of the Mabel Chinnery backseat ghost photo from 1959 with myself, Karen, and with the help of Karen’s partner, Matt Baxter.
I had not seen this uncropped photo that Matt shared during our talk, but his point’s a strong one that the background of the photo, which includes other vehicles, does not resemble the cemetery or surrounding area claimed to be the source of that photo.
In fact, the high wall and distant tall buildings don’t much favor any of the area immediately around the cemetery.
And as Matt also pointed out, it’s unusual for a headstone to be ready promptly unless it was pre-purchased.
And even now, there appears to be no notable headstone.
So the story that the couple was there taking photos at the graveside and finished the roll with a shot of Mr. Chenery might not be quite accurate.
If we take the presumption of sincerity seriously, could the couple have been misremembering the circumstances of the photo?
Was it possible that the previous shot had been of the pre-deceased mother and then, failing to advance the role, Mrs. Chinnery took a shot of her husband sitting in the car and the result was this beautifully centered view of a hybrid of both dead and living, caught by accidents of mechanics and chemistry to resemble a ghost in the backseat?
Is it a hybrid?
If it’s not at the cemetery, could it be an older photo from before she died and through clerical accident it got mixed up with posthumous slides?
We never see any of the other photos in the series.
In fact, that’s a problem with most ghost photos.
The very act of investigation and looking into the context of the whole roll of film is quite unusual.
Of course, that’s only possible on a little window slice of photography.
That period when film had been improved to the point that a strip of film could be tidily put into rolls and taken to the chemist or mailed off to a developer…
And this was just a little slice of time, just a few decades before digital photography would replace much of the process.
And when someone was in the unusual situation of finding that their packet of developed photos held a mysterious artifact suggestive of the supernatural, showing a ghost, an angel, or monsters,
If they took it around to the tabloids, the editors there were not doing investigation.
They didn’t ask to see the envelope and the full reel and the timestamps.
They didn’t look for diary entries or clues whether the story could be verified.
Did they have a good printable photo and did it tell an interesting story?
Yeah?
Yes?
Oh, okay.
Well, let’s publish yet another greatest ghost photo ever taken and get on with the celebrity gossip.
The people who care about whether this stuff is true or not are the very tail end of the food chain.
We are the worms at the bottom of the sea trying to deduce a fully developed sunlit planet of life and beauty from the gray sludge that rains down on the mud in the darkness.
I’m not saying it’s an impossible task.
Every now and then we do get a definitive answer.
But mystery is a little bit like yard plants.
They’ll take hold and grow in the cracks in a barren sidewalk or a driveway or precariously in the side of a water spout.
And so it is with mystery.
A mystery can take root anywhere it can find purchase in the fecund soil of the human mind.
All of us, and probably most of you, are similarly fascinated by such questions and mysteries, but I hope that we’re doing something more than the sort of, that’s cool bro, online ecosystem where this stuff thrives today.
We certainly try.
Monster Talk’s theme music is by Pete Stealing Monkeys.
Remember to insert something upbeat and cheerful here.
This has been a Monster House presentation.
Jim remembers his mother-in-law’s last words.
She said, Jim, you’ll never come to any harm.
She said, I shall still be with you.

The post S05E36 – The Chinnery Backseat Ghost appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Blake, Karen and Matt discover that this famous ghost photo isn’t as old as they expected, and perhaps not as mysterious either. Do we get it right? Do you have a different explanation? Let us know what you think.

The picture was taken by the Reverend Kenneth F. Lord inside the Church of Christ the Consoler, a Victorian Gothic Revival church on the grounds of Newby Hallin North Yorkshire, England. Despite the “medieval monk” legend that grew up around it – complete with claims that the shrouded figure stands some nine feet tall – the church itself was less than a hundred years old when the photo was made. It was built in the 1870s as a memorial to Frederick Vyner, a young heir murdered by Greek bandits, and designed by the architect William Burges.

When Was the Photo Actually Taken?One of the first things we ran into when researching this case is that nobody agrees on when the picture was made. You will see 1954, 1960, and 1963 all stated as plain fact in different places.

As of this recording,Wikipedia says the image was taken in 1963 and cites a 2012 source – which, as far as we can tell, is just repeating later paranormal-echo-chamber retellings rather than anything from the Lords themselves.

Two dates actually trace back to a primary source:

Around 1960.The earliest publication we have found is the August 13, 1967 article in The Sunday People (“Did the vicar snap a GHOST?” by Patrick Kent), which presents itself as the first publication of the photo. It gives no exact date but states the picture was taken “seven years ago” by Rev. Kenneth Lord – which points to roughly 1960.

1954.The 1954 date that keeps turning up traces to Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers (1984), the companion book to the television series. On pages 122 and 123 the story is retold with details that clearly come from an interview with Rev. Lord and his wife.

So we have two candidate dates – 1954 and around 1960 – both apparently rooted in the family’s own account, plus a more recent 1963 date that does not seem to come from the Lords at all. We can’t say for certain which is correct, but it is worth noting that any date other than those two does not appear to come from the primary witnesses.

“Even Experts Admit – We’re Baffled”The 1967 Sunday People piece is worth reading in full. The paper’s own photographic department took the negative to the film’s manufacturer, who reported no signs of tampering or double exposure in the emulsion. The magazine Amateur Photographer was also consulted, and its expert admitted he was simply puzzled.

But the same experts also explained, on the record, how you could fake a very similar picture. Their do-it-yourself recipe: stop the camera down to a very small aperture, place a cloaked figure in position, expose for a few seconds, cap the lens, remove the figure, then uncap the lens and finish the exposure. The result, they said, should be a convincing “ghost.”

The Camera: A RolleicordThe make and model come from the Clarke book retelling, where Mrs. Lord describes the camera used; notably, the 1967 article also reaches for “a Rolleicord” as its example camera when explaining how the effect could be faked. You can read a detailed enthusiast write-up of the Rolleicord IV here.

One detail jumps out: the Rolleicord IV was one of the few twin-lens reflex cameras that allowed deliberate double exposures– a feature most TLRs of the era specifically prevented. That does not prove anything about this particular photograph, but it is a relevant fact to keep in mind when weighing the skeptical explanations.

Book MentionedArthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers[affiliate] by John Fairley and Simon Welfare, with a foreword and epilogue by Arthur C. Clarke (1984). The retelling of the Newby case – and the source of the 1954 date – appears on pages 122 and 123.

References and Further Reading* Spectre of Newby Church (Wikipedia) * Church of Christ the Consoler (Wikipedia) * Newby Hall (Wikipedia) * William Burges, the church’s architect (Wikipedia) * Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers (Wikipedia) * “Did the vicar snap a GHOST?” – The Sunday People, August 13, 1967 (Newspapers.com) * Rolleicord IV camera reference * Multiple exposure (Wikipedia)

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Here’s a famous example made by a respected solicitor in a church in Arendelle, Sussex in 1940.
It shows a weird luminous figure standing in front of the altar.
And here’s another church ghost made by the Reverend Kenneth Lord in his church in Newby, Yorkshire.
And it shows a hooded figure with a ghastly skull-like face standing beside the altar rail.
Well, do these pictures really prove the existence of ghosts?
Or can it be that even when photographers are honest, cameras can lie?
It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24 mile long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland, it’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
Well, I can hardly believe it, but we’re finally doing another one of those shows that Karen and I categorize as things that scared the shit out of us when we were kids.
This time is a simple photograph of a church altar in England, only on the right side of the photo there stands a tall, ghostly phantom in the style of a Scooby-Doo cloaked specter.
This translucent figure appears to be wearing a cloth mask with eye holes, and the story behind the photo is as mysterious as the specter it depicts.
This week, we’re covering the newbie church ghosts here on Monster Talk.
Okay, so what are we talking about before we hop in?
What is our topic today?
Okay, so the newbie church specter, newbie, we’re not talking about Roblox or anything like that.
And not nudie, not nudie either.
No, no.
So this is a place in North Yorkshire in England.
Yeah, we’re talking about a very famous photograph that was taken in this church.
Yeah, I’m looking at the Ghost Photographs Caught on Film, which is a book by Dr. Melvin Willen, part of the SPR.
In the book, I’ll just show you this.
For the listeners, I’m holding up a book.
Oh, let’s see.
OK, I see.
Yeah, there you go.
It’s great.
Yeah.
So the it says location Church of Christ the Consoler, Skelton come newbie, Yorkshire, England, Skelton come newbie.
What?
Why is everything named like Lord of the Rings over there?
I swear.
Lord of the Rings is named like everything over there.
Oh, maybe that’s what it is.
Yeah, you’re right.
Maybe that’s what it is.
Yeah, I guess a little Anglo-Saxon naming.
It just, everything sounds so quaint and fun.
And I swear, when I started looking into this stuff, I ran into so many videos of British people doing ghost investigations.
And I, you know…
Unless I win the lottery, that’s not my life.
But man, there’s so many much older places and it seems so much more fun.
You’ll get there.
I’ll get old anyway, right?
When we were there last year, I just didn’t think about this.
particular case because we were in Yorkshire, which is a very large place.
So, yeah, I’m a little disappointed we didn’t manage to get there, but I don’t know.
Next time.
And Blake, I’m sure you’ll get there.
The black monk of Pontefract kind of distracted us a little bit.
Sure, sure.
It’s also in Yorkshire.
So there’s something about Yorkshire and monks.
We used to dream of having a monk.
If you’re interested in ghost photos, which is always ghost photos, great subject matter for podcasts.
But I mean, for real, I know we all three have spent countless hours looking at ghost photos, trying to recreate them and do all sorts of things with them.
This is a classic.
This is one of those scared the crap out of me as a kid.
Yes.
Yep.
One of the famous ones.
And it’s kind of a little newer than I thought it was.
Yes.
Kind of a newbie.
I had no idea it was such a newbie.
Indeed.
Yeah, but we’ll get into all of that because this is, yeah, this is a tough nut to crack, this one.
There’s a lot of, it seems quite simple on the surface.
Yeah.
There’s a lot more behind the scenes.
I would say that I found it interesting that this represents kind of an entire class of specific kind of ghost photo.
There’s a whole lot of photos of church altars with weird…
mysterious figures in them.
I mean, three or four pop right to mind immediately.
And I know there’s got to be more than that.
But people take a lot of photos in churches and sometimes weird things show up.
So yeah, I found that interesting today when I was trying to find more material on this, how many there are like this.
It is like this entire subcategory.
So yeah, we should add too that we have Matt Baxter joining us for this episode too.
Hi, everybody.
Matt did a lot of research into this because, like you said, Blake, this is one of those photographs scared the crap out of me as a kid too, but I don’t think I really thought too much about it.
I just assumed.
It was a hoax, but I didn’t really look into going into this with any great depth.
So Matt has done a lot of work into this, so it’s good to have him join us.
And I think we should talk a little bit about the history of the place too.
So you mentioned, Blake, the Church of Christ the Consoler in North Yorkshire.
Blake said it was the Christ the Counselor, didn’t he?
That too.
But I think what’s interesting about the place is that it’s old, but it’s relatively new in terms of England.
Very.
built between 1871 and 1876, and it was commissioned by someone.
So a lady, Mary Viner, and it was built on the Newby Hall estate.
And so she spent a lot of money.
It was basically money that she had put together as ransom money because her son, 23-year-old Frederick, had been captured by bandits in Greece.
So a very strange story.
And they…
unlived him uh and that didn’t go well unfortunately really really weird story but uh she she took that money and uh she built this church so anglican church what i find is really strange when you look at the photograph to me it looks very orthodox very kind of older catholic it doesn’t look well yeah the whole church is built in a in a neo-gothic style i guess
Yeah, it is.
Victorian Gothic style, but it’s only a couple of hundred years old.
And so when you think of churches and we think about Borley Rectory, the church there, Borley Church, you know, we’re talking 1100.
So old churches seem to range between about 300 to 900 years old and go back to Anglo-Saxon times and medieval Norman times.
So this is considered to be a newer church, but it is very beautiful.
It’s very ornate.
It’s lovely.
It’s lovely.
It’s really lovely.
It is.
I guess it’s the kind of place where you would find a ghost if you were to find a ghost.
Well, one would hope.
I mean, that’s the other thing is…
Those other churches often have their own history.
Some of them predate the schism with England and the Catholic Church.
So ghostly monks and ghostly nuns are de rigueur for that sort of thing.
And a lot of people have sort of applied folklore.
That’s my interpretation, saying that this is a monk or something.
But there’s no deep history for that to come from.
They’re doing a lot of the heavy lifting there with their own interpretations.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people think it’s a monk.
And some people say, well, there was a monastery a couple of miles away.
And some people talk about it being an 18th century monk, which wouldn’t have been the case.
So others say, oh, no, correct that.
It’s 16th century.
Other people think it’s a shroud.
So not necessarily robes, vestal robes.
But I guess we’re going to get into that a bit more.
So I would urge readers, readers, readers, listeners, readers and listeners and viewers to go and check out this photograph.
Our hardcore listeners always read the transcripts.
Matt, do you want to give us a little bit of a kind of background on why this photograph was taken?
Do we even know?
Well, and that’s one of the fun parts.
If the standard narrative, if you go on, let’s say YouTube and you look this up, you’ll basically find out that Reverend Kenneth Lord, and how’s that for a great name?
We’re going to be vicar.
He photographs determinism.
Exactly.
Yep.
Yep.
Now.
He’s photographing the interior of the church for several reasons, I guess.
One of those reasons is he was going to make a postcard.
Another one was Christmas cards.
Another one, he wanted to send them to his friends.
So it’s kind of blurry on exactly why he took the photo.
No one was visible in the frame when he took the picture.
And then…
The figure appears only after development.
Spooky.
Now, of course, they immediately send this off to Kodak.
And they examine the photo and they say, you know what?
There’s no double exposure here.
The camera he used was double exposure proof.
It’s impossible for it to be a double exposure.
The image was authenticated right there.
Boom.
And we have instant sort of mythology.
Yeah, this will not be the first time longtime listeners will recognize that the endorsement by Kodak used to be the gold standard for this could not possibly be fake.
Right.
So do we know if it was truly sent to Kodak?
Or not?
Another good question.
Sometimes those stories emerge, you know, years later.
My reading suggests somebody really did do that.
But I guess for me, the question is.
Does it matter?
Because Kodak, basically, their determination would be, does it look like the film was tampered with?
And there’s so many ways to do these kind of photos without tampering with the film.
Yes.
That’s a distinction that I think a lot of people don’t make.
Exactly.
Well, I think we talked about that with the Cottingley Fairies as well.
And the Watertown.
Yeah, yeah.
So, yeah, it is, it’s a recurring, it’s almost, so you know how in folklore they have motifs that are recurring motifs?
This feels like a skeptic motif, like this recurring thing that comes up in skeptical discussions of trying to understand what’s happening in these allegedly paranormal photos.
That’s that that is the Kodak or some photographic agency certified it.
And the other one is private investigator firms were hired to research.
And, you know, that kind of you’re looking for an authority to tell you, look, we can’t say it’s paranormal, but we can 100 percent say that nobody tampered with it.
Right.
So.
Yeah, which is not actually what Kodak is saying, but I think that’s the argument for giving it more endorsement from authority.
Exactly.
Yeah, it is a difficult thing because…
Nobody actually knows.
There’s no documentation that we’ve been able to see.
Nothing’s been sort of presented publicly on exactly what they did, who did it, you know, and there should be documentation and there is none.
So it is hard to say, but they did not say this is a ghost.
That’s the bottom line.
They didn’t say that.
What I think is interesting too, Matt, that you found out with the Cottingley Fairies, we talked about the camera, the model, the make, the history of this, of who owned the camera and what was done with it.
But with you looking into this, it seems like we’re not entirely sure what kind of camera was used and we’re not sure about the skill of the Reverend Lord, whether he was a skilled photographer or whether he was an amateur.
What do we know, if anything?
Go ahead, Blake.
I was going to say, I found a newspaper article where Reverend Lord gives an interview, and it’s the only interview I found with him.
And is this the psychic news retrospective?
It was it was the the Sunday People from August 13th, 1967.
OK. And what I thought there’s a whole but this is the only interview that I found.
And I feel like I should put at least for the patrons, I’m going to put this in the show notes.
But this was from newspapers.com, which we only have a subscription to because of the patrons.
So thank you, patrons.
This article was an interview conducted in 1967.
And it has the photo and I don’t, I have not been able to find a pre 1967 publication of the photo.
So this may be the story that got it out into the wild.
So later.
Okay.
But here’s the really weird part.
Okay.
If you go onto Wikipedia and look up this ghost, which we’ll put a link to in the show notes.
And of course this is subject to change because anyone can edit Wikipedia, but.
Their dates, I believe they gave the 1963 date.
That’s what you hear in terms of the folklore.
That’s whatever it is, it’s 63.
Here’s a little quick insert about the dates.
One of the first things we noticed when we started digging into this case is that there are multiple dates alleged for when this photo was taken.
At the time that I’m recording this, Wikipedia says, This image was taken in 1963 by the Reverend Kenneth F. Lord.
And that date is backed up by a reference to a 2012 source that is from a newspaper.
Now, we can’t know for sure when this photo was taken, but we do have two better references to look at.
First, we have an article in the Sunday People from August 13th, 1967.
This article purports to be the first publication of the newbie photo.
It does not provide a specific date for the photograph being taken, but it does say it was taken seven years ago by the Reverend Kenneth Lord.
which would put the date of the photograph around 1960.
The 1967 article mentions that the newspaper had its own photography department take the negatives to the, quote, makers of the film, quote, who did not see signs of tampering.
Their experts also told the author how to make a convincing photo in the same style by using the long exposure method with a lens cap, which we discuss further on in this episode.
So a 1960 date would be a reasonable candidate.
But when I was doing other research, I kept running into a different date, that being 1954.
Now, where was this number coming from?
I will spare you all the details of the hunt, but it was a very satisfying research project.
And a little bonus delight was that when I ran down the source, which was the 1984 Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers companion volume to the TV series, I already had that book on my bookshelf.
It was very exciting.
So sure enough, on pages 122 and 123 is a retelling of the story of the newbie ghost photo.
And it seems obvious from the text that the book
did some kind of interview or interrogation with the Reverend Kenneth Lord and his wife.
They give details about the make and model of the camera used, and while the 1967 newspaper article said that the experts took the negatives to the makers of the film, in this retelling, Mrs. Lord specifies that Kodak itself examined the film and found no tampering.
and that an independent photographer examined it.
Again, this is completely consistent with her recalling the 1967 investigation by the journalists with The People.
So, 1960 or 1954, what we do know is that the Lords were not going to fall for that old trope about how we know they weren’t lying because their story never changes.
But it would appear any other dates besides 1960 or 1954 are not coming from the primary source of either the Reverend Lord or his wife.
So links to those sources will be in the show notes.
Excluding tampering with the film does not mean that the photo was not able to have been faked.
It just means that whatever was being done may have been done in camera without the need for tampering with the actual film.
But the camera’s type is a RolioCord 4, that’s IV, with a 75 millimeter lens, which has a six by six square aspect ratio negative.
Now, this matters because all the discussions about sending the negatives for study and all this research around it.
you will not find a square aspect ratio copy of this photo.
So much like the Watertown ghost, every photo you see has been cropped.
Why?
I don’t know.
Probably for dramatic focus on the part of the image that’s interesting.
But it does cut down on our capability to do a full analysis of the photo if we never get the full photo.
Just a little complaint there.
Well, and that’s absolutely true.
And, you know, you look at the photos being shown online, and they’re so degraded from, you know, reproduction after reproduction.
And the Rollycord 4 was a decent camera.
It’s a…
You know, you got this waist level viewfinder and it’s 120 roll film.
It’s a fairly serious, you know, camera that you’re using here.
So whoever did take this picture wasn’t a newbie when it came to cameras.
You know, they kind of knew what they were doing enough.
So, and yes, that camera also did make it more difficult to accidentally get a double exposure.
But you could absolutely trick the camera into making a double exposure as well.
So it’s…
You know, that whole thing is absolutely impossible to be a double.
No, it’s not true.
It’s not true at all.
But, yeah, that’s a huge thing.
When a picture is cropped like that and you’ve got the way it’s cropped, you’re showing the ghost to be sort of toward the right of the photo.
what part of the picture was cropped because if the picture that would have been taken directly before that or after that, have the guy in costume ready to jump in, you know, and, and, you know, be ready to, to, to take a, a slow shutter picture.
Um,
We would see that in either the one directly before it or the one directly after that.
You could probably see, and that’s why they cropped it.
Now, this is all just guessing at this point.
It’s not even educated guessing.
It’s just guessing.
But there’s too many holes, and the way this story came out, it was so sort of prepackaged.
You know, it was all ready to be a legend immediately out of the box.
And that’s just strange.
And then now we’re finding out that the date we’re being fed is not even accurate.
Yeah, and I found a – this is an old, old, old, old website from back when the internet was people who knew stuff.
It was on GeoCities originally, but it was – Oh, wow.
Isn’t that Geocities?
That’s funny.
People –
People with expertise used to take the time to build sites to share their knowledge.
And I should put a link to this in the show notes.
Here’s a little excerpt.
It says, The Rolio cords aren’t as luxurious to handle as the T or the more expensive 3.5F models.
The shutter release is primitive.
Slide the little lever under the taking lens over to cock the shutter.
Squeeze it to fire.
A little bonus with the 4 is that you can make double exposures, something that’s not possible with most TLRs.
However, they’re a good beginner’s camera and capable of results to match the T. Hmm.
Selling.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I actually found a website that gives instructions on how to do photos like this with that camera.
Okay.
So it can be done.
But I still have so many questions.
And so we’ve talked a little bit about the photograph and how it could have been cropped.
What about the quality?
So, all right, the original wasn’t tampered with, but what about the version that we see everywhere, splashed on the internet today, on YouTube, in books?
It does seem a little bit different to the original one.
And I’ve only seen…
fleeting glimpses of the original one, and it looked different.
It looked a lot darker.
Matt, can you tell us a bit about this?
Well, actually, I want to note, Blake, you’ve got that book there.
How does the picture look in that book in comparison to what you largely see on the internet?
Faded, not nearly as crisp.
And that’s one of the big things right there.
I think that’s the point.
The contrast, I think, has been cranked up on so many of these to bring out detail that actually was never even there.
So I’m doing a lot of this episode.
I’m nodding vigorously in agreement.
I don’t know if you can get a snapshot or something of the photo, the way it looks in that book for the show notes to do a comparison with what you normally see online.
Yeah, I think that that itself would be very telling for it.
I’ve been really working hard on improving the show notes for the show and putting a lot of extra material in.
And in this one in particular, I found a lot of people who went and tried to do recreations because I guess one of the claims we’re about to get to is how tall is the figure in the photo?
Mm-hmm.
and people doing recreations, that kind of stuff.
You’re going to need to go to the webpage at monstertalk.org and look at the show notes to see these.
But I’ll aggregate a lot of material there for you.
Well, I did just want to hearken back to something that Matt said a little while ago, and that was talking about…
that this is the only shot that we have from that series.
Yes.
And that there’s no before shot and no after shot, which could be telling.
And Matt, I just wanted you to tell your little story again about why that’s important.
My little story.
I was just going to say, because you will not believe how much weight that ghost has lost between the before and after.
It’s amazing.
Taking ghost zimpic.
It was stuffing his stomach in.
Exactly.
I think it was all lighting.
But years and years ago, there was a paranormal group that wanted to do an investigation of a local place called the Brook Forest Inn in Evergreen, Colorado.
And they told them, the Brook Forest Inn told this group that you cannot do that unless you involve Matthew Baxter somehow.
And so what was agreed upon was that I would give them a short course on how to do a more skeptical, more critical thinking style of a paranormal investigation.
And one of those things that I told them to do was don’t run around taking pictures in the dark and don’t think you see something in one picture and throw away all the rest.
So they did exactly that.
They ran around and took pictures in the dark.
And then they sent me one picture is like, what is this?
And it was basically a very, very, very, very dark picture that you could barely see.
So I said, well, where’s the pictures before it and after it?
Oh, we threw all those away because there wasn’t anything in them.
Nothing interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But what those photos would have told me is where they were in the building when that picture was taken.
So what I ended up having to do is lighten it and lighten it and lighten it the best I could.
And it started to look like some sort of beast, you know, a demonic beast, like a possessed dog or something.
And so I’m thinking, what the heck is this?
So I had to actually drive up there, up to Evergreen, and walk around until I saw something that sort of matched what it could be, you know, with pareidolia and everything.
And finally, I did find it.
They took a picture of a picture hanging on the wall of a stone lion statue.
I love that story.
Yeah, you’re enlightened.
Yeah.
But I mean, that’s just one reason why having pictures before and after are important.
Yeah, I agree.
Not even just to tell you where you are, you know, in the course of things, but you don’t know what’s happening with the lighting.
You don’t know what’s happening with, you know, whether or not somebody was walking out of frame or you just don’t know a lot of things that can be answered by having pictures.
Pictures taken before and pictures taken after.
So we’re missing information with this case.
Exactly.
So you have this one picture in isolation and it becomes the entire story.
And that’s a problem.
It is.
This photo now is probably, we don’t know the exact date, but we could say more than 70 years old, right?
And it’s been subjected to all sorts of photographic analysis.
People have gone and tried to do recreations.
But there is a, I don’t know, it’s not in some field of study, but there’s a kind of expertise around photography called, oh, Lord, I’m going to mess this up.
I read it all the time.
It’s one of those words I’ve never said before.
Paradigm.
Yeah.
Once I cross this chasm, we’ll be right to the end.
Photogrammetry?
Photogrammetry?
Photogrammetry.
Photogrammetry.
This is studying photos to determine the internal geometry of the photo using reference points.
Because you’re basically trying to get a 3D understanding of an area by using 2D analysis.
Wow.
Does that stem from medical?
I’ve mostly heard about it from anthropology.
But it’s really geometry and trigonometry at play.
But what you can do, what nobody seems to have bothered to have done, which would be useful…
People have done a lot of recreation photos, but you got to remember that the focal length of the lens can affect how things appear.
So one way to sort of remove that as a factor is to actually go to the site, find the distance between the railing.
and the altar, and then measure those elements so that you can actually sort of have a 3D understanding of what the geometry looks like.
And given that information and the ratio change between the background material and the foreground material, it should be possible to get a really accurate understanding of how tall this figure is.
But since the 1970s…
The general ghost literature calls this a nine foot ghost.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
Which makes me think about parallels to Bigfoot too.
Oh, he’s eight feet tall.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
He’s Bob Hieronymus tall.
Six foot four.
I’m inclined to think that this ghost is a little more than six feet tall, but that’s exactly how…
I feel like it’s probably possible to determine exactly how tall.
There’s ambiguity around the footing because we can’t quite tell whether the ghost is on the ground or standing on a box because there’s a shadowy robe-like structure…
He’s floating.
…cascading down over the stairs.
But we could get some pretty solid…
I think, well, that’s kind of a funny word, but I think we get some fairly accurate guesses about how tall this figure is.
But I am inclined to think a little over six feet.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I tend to agree.
I know that there have been people there that have kind of tried to recreate it and have shown that, you know, as much shorter people can give that same illusion of being that high.
But then again, we still don’t know, you know, the focal length or anything else.
So it is hard to say.
I absolutely agree with that.
And you have to wonder, did a man measure it or a woman?
Because it would be more accurate if it was a woman.
Or if it was a fisherman that measured it.
We’ve got all these questions.
One got away.
So what I wanted to ask is one of the biggest skeptical theories that I’ve heard about is the vestments theory and using double exposure.
And so the idea is that the image was created using or by draping church robes and vestments over the altar of steps and then combining that with a double exposure.
And apparently there was a common trick in early photography.
So I don’t know if that’s correct or not, but gives that illusion of this hooded, towering, semi-transparent kind of entity.
Do you think that that’s a possibility in terms of explanations for the photograph?
It makes more sense than a ghost.
In a nutshell, yeah.
I mean, if we’re at the point where we want to discuss our hypotheses about what’s really going on here, I, a lot.
of discussion has been about camera artifacts or, you know, accidental things.
I’ll be blunt.
This to me looks entirely like a hoax.
The figure in the photo looks too much like a person wearing a hood and a cowl, uh, cloak kind of combo.
Uh,
And to get around the question of whether it’s a double exposure or not, I don’t even think that’s necessary.
I think a timed exposure.
I agree.
I agree.
What’s the difference then for someone like me?
What’s the difference between timed exposure and double exposure?
If you set a time exposure, it opens the camera to the light for a long period of time, so you get more detail.
But it also means that if something moves through the scene quickly, it pauses and then moves out, it can appear translucent, like it only partially appears on the film.
Or the Cottingley Ferries.
Those were long exposures and timed exposures, I guess you could say.
And the thing with those is that you see the water running in the back is blurred.
Absolutely.
Yep.
And this camera did have a long, it had a very variable exposure setting.
So that is possible with this camera.
I guess the simplest, simplest way to say it is you’re basically taking two pictures on the same piece of film.
over the same, you know, picture area.
So yeah, like you don’t, some of the cameras required you to manually forward to the next frame.
And if you didn’t, you remember that you could take two snaps.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You could take two snapshots on the same area of negative and both would kind of bleed together and make something what most people would call trash.
But every now and then that trash would turn out to be something mysterious.
Yeah.
Yeah.
When I was a kid, I took one accidentally of my box turtle eating the side of our house.
It was a giant turtle.
And that was great.
But yeah, so it’s double exposures are wake perspective.
Yes.
Double exposures are awesome.
But yeah, with the timed exposure, a long exposure.
It is, it’s a lot of times they were done with the lens cap.
So you would take the lens cap off.
I’m clapping in agreement.
Yeah, sorry.
Yeah.
And until, you know, you’ve enough light had got on and you put the lens cap back on.
Well, what they would do if you wanted to do a great timed exposure fraud shot is you would have it all set up with the person there, you know, that you want them to be translucent.
And you take the lens cap off and you get just like a few moments of that.
You put the lens cap back on.
They get out of the shot.
And then you take the lens cap back off and everything else is sharper and brighter.
in the picture except for that anomalous figure.
And the reason you do the lens cap trick is because it keeps you from seeing the sort of motion of them moving through the frame.
One of the other ghost photos they look at is another one in a church.
And in this one, there’s a weird figure.
and there’s an arc of light moving up, and the photo…
It’s an angel.
Well, what happens to the analysis people look at is like, look, you can literally hear them sort of deciphering what’s going on.
The arc of the light, the little arc, is going towards a candle, and they realize what’s happening is a long exposure shot, and someone’s moving through the frame, lighting the candle with tapers.
And so that’s what they’re seeing.
It’s very weird looking until you realize what’s actually going on.
It’s like, oh, of course, right?
It makes perfect sense.
But in this case, by doing a lens cap type thing, you eliminate all that blur.
You just get a nice crisp two shots together.
But what, very importantly, it would pass the Kodak seal of approval.
No sign of a double exposure, right?
It’s like…
In this home office laboratory is the world’s most advanced equipment for the examination of photographs.
Using a computer, forensic experts help the police to snare criminals by enhancing photographic images to bring out hidden detail.
Today, the computer is focused on the phantoms.
The photographs are optically scanned and fed into the computer for analysis.
But what about the sinister figure snapped by the Reverend Kenneth Lord in his church at Newby in Yorkshire?
Even the most rigorous computer analysis cannot provide a simple photographic explanation.
I don’t think at this stage there’s anything unusual about the picture at all.
So I think our conclusions from this is that it’s unlikely to have been built up by a superposition of photographs.
So this could be a candidate for a ghost.
Although a very few photographs are difficult to explain away, not a single one of them offers convincing proof that a ghost has been captured by the camera.
And this, I believe, provides conclusive evidence about the nature of ghosts.
For more than a century, millions of cameras have been clicking all over the world.
By this time, there must be billions of photographs in existence.
If ghosts could be photographed, by now we’d have entire galleries full of portraits.
But we don’t, because these images exist only in the minds of the observers.
I believe that ghosts are at least as real as dreams, and no one has ever photographed a dream.
Yet one day, that might be possible, and then we’d have cameras that could really capture ghosts.
Well, another question.
If we want to give the benefit of the doubt to Lorde, could this be an accident?
In my opinion, no, absolutely not.
This is totally a fraud.
OK, yeah, I said it.
I mean, it’s it’s a guy dressed in a costume with a hood pulled over his eyes, like, you know, with the the eye holes cut out from like a pillowcase or something.
Things happened like whoops.
Well, see, I was I was late to my Klan meeting and ran through the church.
Funny you should say that.
The face does look a little bit like a kind of, you know, sweet ghost boob.
The thing that I’ve noticed nobody has said, they’re saying, oh, it’s a monk.
Oh, you know, but that doesn’t look like a monk’s face.
You know, robes.
And then they say, oh, well, it’s someone that’s got bandages on their face.
Well, it doesn’t look like bandages.
No one has said it looks like death.
It just doesn’t have a sign.
Yeah, it’s just not playing chess or whatever.
Yeah, exactly.
But no, the thing is, hey, scythes don’t matter.
That’s what I’ve heard.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
But nobody says that.
And I find that interesting because that’s the first thing I think of.
But back to the whole thing of could this be an accident?
Let’s just say that I agree with Blake.
But if we were going to say between it being an actual ghost or it being an accident…
there’s far more accident photos than there are ghost photos.
So, again, it’s more likely to be an accident than it is to be a ghost, but it’s more likely to be a hoax than it is to be an accident.
And do you think it could have been…
Here’s another theory I’ve heard.
Someone playing a trick on the reverend.
I mean, it’s got a long exposure setting, but not that long.
Somebody had to be standing by…
in a costume, ready to hop up on the steps.
But he also said he was taking the photos because he wanted to make a series of postcards as a fundraiser.
Ironic, isn’t it?
What about the Christmas card?
I’ve had so many different theories.
Oh, that’s funny.
I guess my question is, if you’re making postcards for the church to raise funds, surely the ghost photo is the one you want to make into a fundraiser.
I mean, that’s awesome.
Yeah.
Well, didn’t he claim too that he didn’t want it to attract more people to the church or ghost hunters or anything like that?
Yeah, he implied very strongly that he was not a publicity seeker.
And again, there was a big gap between the time the photo or some kind of gap between the time the photo was taken.
Reminding me too, just briefly, you mentioned the interview that he did with the media.
Matt, you mentioned some other…
newsletter or newspaper or something.
Were you being facetious or was this another interview?
No, it was, it was, uh, another story.
It was a retrospective and it might’ve referenced that interview, but it was in the, what I said, the psychic times.
No, that’s actually true.
There was, that’s how I found out.
That’s how I found out it was the, the roller cord, uh, for camera.
Um, but so, you know, Blake and I came to the same conclusion off of a different trail, uh, which is pretty cool, I think.
Um, but, uh,
In that particular story, he says that he had just become the vicar, and we really do need to find out if we can see when he became vicar, because that will also help us find out if he’s telling the truth.
Right, if it was 54 or 67.
Right, yeah.
But he had just become vicar, and he wanted to take some pictures of the church, the inside of the church, for his friends, to send to his friends.
That’s what was said in that particular interview.
Yeah, the story changes a little bit, which is in line with— Another hallmark.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
So I was trying to find information about the Reverend Lord, which doesn’t that sound like some kind of special title?
Anyway.
Oh, it sounds like an email from a Nigerian prince or something.
Dear Reverend Lord.
Yeah.
But aside from that article about the original ghost photo, the only other thing I could find was in 1970, there’s a strange article that says, Anne, the girl with two fiancés,
And it’s about this woman named Ann Collins who wants to marry a guy who is in Brazil.
And because of some problems with timing and trips and immigration and rules, they got permission to do a proxy wedding, which I have never heard of before.
I don’t know what exactly.
Basically to have another guy stand in for the groom so they can do the wedding.
Was he dressed like the Grim Reaper when he stood in?
Well, it says they found that Anne would only be able to get a temporary three-month visa unless you were married.
So John’s father, the Reverend Kenneth Lord, Vicar of Skelton, tried to arrange a proxy wedding with Christopher taking John’s place.
They got permission from the Church of England, but the Brazilian authorities would not accept the plans.
They were trying to save a 400-pound airfare to England, but now John will have to make the journey, said Anne.
So this is the Reverend’s son in Brazil trying to get a friend to cover for him for the wedding.
I’ve never heard of anything like that.
And that’s the only other newspaper article I found concerning the vicar.
So the only thing that we’ve heard about him are two different stories that are slightly suspect.
They’re a little sus.
They are a little sus.
Yeah, but yeah, it just does.
Matt and I were discussing this behind the scenes.
Could the reverend be lying?
And it just made us think about the episode that we just recorded about the devil’s footprints and the reverend in that story or thinking about Reverend Foister in the…
It’s all the kangaroos.
Yeah, that there are precedents for reverends lying.
But I just wonder what was his point?
Because if he goes on record and says, look, I’m not wanting to attract attention, what was his motive if this was a hoax?
Yeah.
Sometimes you do things just to see if you can get away with it.
Bit of fun.
Indeed.
I mean, it’s all super sus to me.
But also, I mean, let’s assume because I kind of agree with Matt that it’s probably a long exposure.
So a little bit of work has to go into play here.
Right.
And two people have to be involved to do the little lens cap trick or he’s an elaborate machine maker, you know, like to build a little device.
But I think the most likely scenario is he has an accomplice.
Right.
And he says in that article, again, from the Sunday People in 1967, that he was going to make photographs to do fundraising postcards.
Fundraising, okay.
Where are those fundraising postcards?
Like, I mean, did they come into existence?
I don’t know, right?
Right, yeah, nothing more came of that.
Yeah, that is strange.
Again, if you’re going to make postcards, the one with the ghost is probably going to be the bestseller, right?
But, you know, I don’t know.
So anyway, it’s an interesting article.
It’s certainly an interesting photograph, but the biggest shock for me looking into this was I had no idea.
that this photo was from the sixties or slash fifties, because I assumed this was from the height of spiritualist photographs in the twenties and thirties.
1920s.
That’s what I thought too.
That’s exactly what I thought.
And I did assume that it was a hoax, but I, I couldn’t explain it.
I don’t have the knowledge of photography that Matt has and that you have.
And, but I still just thought, Oh, that’s a hoax of some kind.
Yeah, well, Nigel Bundy, who sent us this, what he sent was actually a really interesting YouTube video, which we’ll also link to.
But he’s always sending me really cool stuff around ghosts.
It’s just…
This is a classic, this one.
It really is.
But the Ghost Club has been around for ages.
And in many ways, it’s sort of the, I guess, the longest lived sort of…
They’re not professional exactly, but longest lived investigative social group for looking into this kind of material.
And what I like about them is that not only did they look at the allegedly real ghost, but they also love a good ghost story.
So, you know, that doesn’t really matter whether or not it’s…
Potentially real or not.
We should probably talk about them too, with all the connections.
Absolutely.
So Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens.
So many, so many.
So I, I, between them and the SPR, you know, a wealth of material that has shown up on the show originates.
So much appreciated.
Yeah.
Well, I think we’ve kind of given away our perspectives.
As to what we think is behind this.
I do want to send over, Blake, a copy of the PDF of the Psychic Times that actually had this article in it.
And what was said in this particular article was…
He took the photos right after he became vicar.
He did it to send to some friends, and a dozen photographs were reportedly taken, and one other person was present.
I bet they were.
Yes, yes.
So very, very interestingly, supposedly it was like an assistant in taking the pictures and everything.
I mean…
As a child, this photo haunted me, right?
Legit haunted me.
Me too.
As an adult who’s… Oh, my God.
I don’t… Karen, and you too, Matt.
I mean, how many hundreds or thousands of ghost photos have we looked at?
It’s a lot, right?
Yeah, like seven or something.
It’s a lot.
It is.
But now going back to this now, it just…
Looks like distinctively phony to me now in a way that it looked distinctively real or plausible.
When you were five.
Yeah.
Well, you remember the whole thing with, was it the Usborne books?
Oh, yeah.
The Walsingham.
Oh, yeah.
The Walsingham ghost.
Yeah.
That scary blue face.
It was just terrifying.
And then we find out it’s Lon Chaney.
Lon Chaney.
Which is pretty scary.
Yeah, so when you’re a kid, the things that scares you makes you laugh when you’re older.
Yeah, a lot of times.
Except the monster under the bed, obviously.
But I still love the photograph.
It just reminds me of my childhood and just makes me think about all the mysteries in the world.
So I still do love it.
It is beloved.
It’s beloved.
Interesting to take a deeper look at it and take some new perspectives and come up with some possible explanations for it.
Makes it less creepy, but still fun.
I’m sort of imagining that the vicar is Simon Pegg and Nick Frost is his assistant.
And they’re doing they’re faking the photo in the church.
And then it’s like, dude, you know, where did you get the the the pillowcase?
He’s like, oh, I borrowed it from my house.
Your mom’s going to kill you.
It’s like you could definitely go south.
All right.
So but it really not leprosy.
No, well, that’s the other thing.
All these little, the folklore around this stuff is always like, it’s a monk and he had leprosy and these are leprosy bandages.
It’s like, why not syphilis?
I mean, come on.
You go straight to leprosy because of the well-known leprosy problem, right?
No, no, syphilis.
Come on, the nose falls right off.
By that time, it would have been syphilis.
But yeah, it’s…
Again, I’m not too sure.
I thought it looked like a skull almost when I was a child.
As a kid, I agree.
It looked like a skull.
As an adult, it looks like a Klansman.
Which is much more scary.
Very frightening.
Well, I feel like we’ve provided ample, plausible explanations for what’s going on.
I don’t think, unfortunately, all the mystery in this one comes down to how it was faked, honestly.
Exactly how did they fake this?
Exactly.
This is not the Patterson-Gimlin film.
This is…
So it is a shockingly, what is it, retro, I guess would be the right word, considering the way it appears and when it popped up and everything.
But I still love it.
I really do.
Let’s think just for a second, though.
So we’re talking about the new perspectives on the Patterson-Gimlin film, and that’s the same era.
So I think it’s likely that more information could come to light.
There had to be someone helping.
I’m shocked there hasn’t been a deathbed confession or something.
Church lady or something.
I’m getting suspicious.
Yeah.
It’s very sus.
Very sus.
Could the assistant be Satan?
Aha.
Well, again, thank you to Nigel Bundy for sending this in and prompting us to talk about something we’ve known about for decades but never bothered to talk about.
Yeah, no, that definitely motivated us to get this one done, finally.
Indeed, indeed.
And thanks for joining us, Matt.
Thanks, Matt.
Love the new recording equipment.
You sound very mature.
Thank you.
Sound.
All right.
Thanks a lot, guys.
And good night.
Okay.
Good night.
Thank you.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard me, Karen, and guest co-host Matt Baxter discussing the famous ghost photo of a specter in Newby Church.
Check our show notes for links for further reading.
While the producers of Arthur C. Clarke’s show couldn’t definitively prove the photo is fraudulent, we here at Monster Talk are leaning very strongly on its technical and stylistic resemblance to numerous known hoaxes from the history of spirit photography to reach our own skeptical conclusions.
We know how to produce photos like this with the camera used, and such hoaxes look just like this one.
It does remind me a bit of Bob Gimlin allegedly being taken in by Roger Patterson’s Bigfoot setup.
versus being an active participant.
For me, that’s too much of a stretch.
And similarly here, people speculate how the photographer might have been duped by pranksters.
It’s much more parsimonious to conclude that the Reverend Lord was being a bit irreverent when he took this photo with the help of an accomplice.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of Monster Talk.
Each episode, we strive to bring you the very best in monster-related content with a focus on bringing scientific skepticism into the conversation.
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The post S05E35 The Newby Church Specter appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Most Americans meet the Rakshasa in exactly two places: a 1974 episode of a beloved horror TV series and the pages of the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Both versions give you a debonair, tiger-faced shape-changer with a taste for human flesh – but neither prepares you for how deep, how old, and how genuinely alive these creatures are. To dig us out of that pop-culture foxhole, we sat down with academic researcher Eric Zsebenyi for a tour that runs from the Rig Veda to the Ramayana, into Buddhism, through present-day Sri Lankan politics, and finishes at the tent-shaped tomb of a very naughty Victorian translator.

Our GuestEric Zsebenyi holds a master’s degree from Naropa University (2000) and has pursued Buddhist studies as a lifelong avocation alongside a career as a civil servant. His path to the Rakshasas began with a Dharma protector named Vetali in his own meditation practice – which, as you’ll hear, leads straight back to one of India’s stranger monsters. Blake met Eric at the recent Gods & Monsters Conference, where Eric delivered a paper on the Vetala.

You can find Eric’s work here: Eric Zsebenyi on Academia.edu

Where Most Americans First Met the RakshasaThe audio at the top of the episode comes from Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Season 1, Episode 11, “Horror in the Heights,” which first aired on ABC on December 20, 1974. In it, reporter Carl Kolchak investigates a string of grisly deaths among elderly Jewish residents of a Chicago neighborhood – a story laced with spray-painted swastikas that turns out to be a misdirect. The real culprit is a shape-changing monster that appears to each victim as the person they trust most.

It was the only Kolchak script written by Jimmy Sangster, the prolific Hammer horror veteran. The guest cast is a parade of familiar faces, including Phil Silvers, Herb Vigran, and the always-welcome Murray Matheson as the antiquarian master of exposition. You may also know Matheson as the clown in the classic Twilight Zone episode “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” and from the series Banacek.

The other great American gateway is the first-edition AD&D Monster Manual (1977), where Gary Gygax gave us a tiger-headed, pipe-smoking humanoid in a fur-trimmed silken robe – a flesh-eating illusionist that can only be reliably put down by a crossbow bolt blessed by a cleric. (Where, you might ask, did a crossbow bolt come from? Listen for Eric’s theory.) The Rakshasa’s now-iconic backward-facing hands didn’t arrive until the 1989 Monstrous Compendium, which added a note that their palms seem to commonly curve backward – a detail artists soon turned into a visual “tell” for players.

Into the Texts: From the Vedas to the EpicsThe Rakshasa goes all the way back to the Rig Veda (composed roughly 1500 BCE), with linguistic cousins in the Avestan language of early Iranian religion. In the earliest layers they’re called rakshas, a word that carries a double sense of “one who guards” and “one who injures” – fitting for entities that sorcerers summon to disrupt the Vedic fire sacrifice. Eric walks us through how the Vedas sit at the foundation of a layered literature (Brahmanas, Upanishads, and onward) in which nothing is ever quite superseded.

The Rakshasas reach their peak as antagonists in the great epics, the Mahabharata and especially the Ramayana. Their king is Ravana – originally named Dashagriva, “the ten-necked one,” and renamed (roughly) “the roarer” after Shiva pinned him under a mountain and set him howling. Granted a boon by Brahma that he could not be slain by gods or demons, Ravana dismissed mere humans as beneath his notice – so Vishnu incarnated as the human prince Rama to undo him. (If “no man can slay him” rings a bell, you’re not alone.)

How to Ward Off (or Outright Kill) a RakshasaBecause the early Rakshasas attacked the sacrifice, the natural countermeasure was the fire god himself, Agni, who could be invoked to burn them up; Indra and other gods could be called on too. There are protective herbs and amulets, and once the Rakshasas were absorbed into Buddhism, chanting the name of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara (as in the Lotus Sutra) became a recognized ward.

As for that Kolchak/D&D crossbow bolt, Eric traces it to the Brahmastra – the celestial weapon of Brahma that Rama affixes to his bow to finally kill Ravana. Each great god has such a weapon; the crossbow appears to be a later screenwriter’s flourish on a much older idea.

A Few Rakshasas Worth KnowingRakshasas come in male and female (rakshasi), beautiful and hideous, good and bad – a kind of dark mirror of human society. Some are born to it; others are cursed into the form and stuck that way until the curse is lifted (the Ramayana has some almost comic examples of monsters thanking Rama for hacking their arms off). A few standouts from the episode:

Shurpanakha – Ravana’s sister, whose advances toward Rama end with her nose and ears cut off, setting the epic’s central conflict in motion.

Putana – the rakshasi who tried to murder the infant Krishna with poisoned breast milk, only to be drained dry herself – and who is later resurrected as a devotee and protector of Krishna’s teachings.

For context, the Hindu and Buddhist worlds are crowded with other beings Eric name-checks – pishachas, yakshas, nagas, and the dead who become a preta before (ideally) joining the ancestors. We have promised to slowly snake our way toward a Naga episode in due course.

In the Tantric Buddhist tradition, that fierce Rakshasa energy isn’t only destructive: the wrathful figure Yamantaka, “the ender of death,” has a Rakshasa-headed form, the kind of ferocity said to be necessary to cut through stubborn ego and delusion.

Ravana Reborn: Sri Lanka’s “Ravanisation”One of the episode’s biggest surprises is how political this monster has become. In Sri Lanka, predominantly Buddhist, Ravana has long been read less as a villain than as a culture hero – the island’s first great king and defender. Since the end of the civil war in 2009, scholars have tracked a surge of Sinhalese-Buddhist interest in him, a phenomenon religious-studies researcher Deborah de Koning has named “Ravanisation”. It has even produced a nationalist organization, the Ravana Balaya.

This dovetails with a strand of ancient-astronaut and lost-civilization speculation – the idea that the epics describe real flying machines (the Pushpaka Vimana, locally “Dandu Monara”) and ancient super-weapons. It’s a full Erich von Däniken move, and we tried to handle it with care: for a great many people, these aren’t dusty myths but a present and lived reality.

Bonus Round: Vetalas, Vampires, and a Very Strange TombThe episode closes on a detour into Eric’s favorite monster, the Vetala – the corpse-animating spirit at the heart of the Baital Pachisi, or “Twenty-Five Tales of the Vetala.” In the frame story, a king must repeatedly carry a Vetala-inhabited body to a sorcerer while the creature tells riddling tales and threatens to split the king’s head if he wrongly stays silent. Depending on the era, a Vetala reads like a zombie, a ghoul, or something closer to a djinn.

The “vampire” label comes from Sir Richard Francis Burton, who rendered the collection as Vikram and the Vampire (1870) – a loose translation that has irritated Sanskritists ever since. Burton famously also translated the Arabian Nights, and moved in a circle that included Bram Stoker; whether there’s any direct line from the Vetala to Dracula remains, as Eric puts it, a smoking gun nobody has found yet. (Burton’s full text is free at Project Gutenberg if you’d like to read the tales for yourself.)

And yes, Burton has one of the great tombs – a stone replica of an Arabic traveling tent, in the churchyard of St Mary Magdalen Roman Catholic Church in Mortlake, in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. His wife Isabel famously burned a great deal of his papers after his death. More information and photos here: Mausoleum of Sir Richard and Lady Burton.

Eric first encountered the feminine form, Vetali, through Chögyam Trungpa, the founder of Naropa University, where she appears as a wrathful protector related to Palden Lhamo (Shri Devi).

One More Rabbit HoleFor Blake’s “how did I not notice this” moment: the Robert Redford golf film The Legend of Bagger Vance is a retelling of the Bhagavad Gita – “Bagger Vance” is Bhagavan (Krishna), and the troubled golfer “R. Junuh” is Arjuna. Western esotericism has been dipping into Indian religion for well over a century, from Theosophy onward.

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Oh, Mr. Marriott Lane.
My name is Carl Kolchak.
I’m with the INS.
And you, sir, are the foremost expert on East Indian arts.
And I have a few questions for you.
Now, I’m trying to find out something about a creature named a raca, raca shootsie, raca lanky, raca something.
I didn’t hear it too well.
That’s it.
That’s it.
Good.
Well, that’s all right.
Don’t worry about me.
I don’t have to be back at the office.
Now, go on.
Give me the proof about this Rakshasa.
Well, the Rakshasa is the disciple of Ravana.
Ravana, whose deeds were so horrible, he stopped the sun and the moon in their course.
Do you know I had a date with a girl in colleges like that once?
Mr. Kolchak, a Rakshasa is an evil spirit who can possess a man’s mind and delights in the consumption of human flesh.
Really?
It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24 mile long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland, it’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
The audio clip at the top of the episode was excerpted from the television show Kolchak the Night Stalker, Season 1, Episode 11, titled Horror in the Heights.
In this episode, our protagonist, the intrepid reporter Carl Kolchak, investigates a string of horrific murders of elderly Jewish community members in a Chicago neighborhood.
The victims, primarily being elderly Jews, is exacerbated by the rampant graffiti of spray painted swastikas around the neighborhood.
But this is not a very special Night Stalker about real monsters of racism and anti-Semitism.
No, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster, famous for his many Hammer horror movies, does a bait and switch on us.
And the person painting the swastikas isn’t a Nazi, but turns out to be a misunderstood immigrant from India who’s trying to protect the community from a very different kind of monster.
One that shape changes into the visage of the person the victim trusts the most.
It’s a great episode with lots of twists, plus a slew of easily recognized character actors like Phil Silvers and Herb Vigran.
And I’m always delighted to see Murray Matheson show up.
Here, he plays an antiquarian master of exposition, but I also love him as the rare book dealer in the TV series Banachek.
You might also recognize him for his role as a clown in the Twilight Zone episode, Five Characters in Search of an Exit.
As we’ll unpack in the interview, the two places most Americans probably learned about Rakshasas are from this episode of the Night Stalker and from the Monster Manual in Dungeons & Dragons.
Way back in the first edition of the Monster Manual, there’s a gorgeous black-and-white illustration of a tiger-headed, pipe-smoking humanoid monster in a fur-trimmed silken robe surrounded by exotic incense and magical accoutrements.
Here’s what the entry says about these potential creature encounters.
Known first in India, these evil spirits encased in flesh are spreading.
They are fond of a diet of human meat and as masters of illusion, they can easily gain this end.
Rakshasas are able to employ ESP and then create the illusion of what those who have encountered them deem friendly.
They can then withhold attack until the prey can be taken off guard.
Although capable of using both magic user spells up to third level and cleric spells first level,
They are not affected by spells under the 8th level.
Rakshasas cannot be harmed by non-magical weapons.
Magical weapons below plus 3 do half damage, but hits by crossbow bolts blessed by a cleric will kill them.
If more than one Rakshasa is in its lair, then the group will be a male and one or more females.
That Night Stalker episode aired in December of 1974, and the first edition of the Monster Manual came out in 1977.
So many details in the Monster Manual entry suggest Gygax is getting his information from that noted monsterologist, Professor Carl Kolchak.
And he could have done worse.
A funny feature of the D&D version of the rickshasa is that in the very first entry, neither the text nor the illustration hint at what would become the distinguishing feature of these feline fraudsters.
In 1989’s Monstrous Compendium, Volume 1, the entry on rickshasa was expanded to include the sentence, Hands whose palms curve backwards, away from the body, seem to be common.
Artists like Jim Holloway started using the visual indicator of the backwards-facing hand as a visual tell, and soon that became a vital clue for players trying to figure out what they were dealing with when a game master wanted to give them hints about any mysterious, powerful, and magical foes not yet revealed in their true form.
The visual language of these mythical shape-changing creatures was being distilled into a specific form, the fancy feline with backwards hands who liked to toy with its food.
So my interest in these creatures has been long gestating, and we’re long past due giving these creatures the Monster Talk introduction.
I met Eric Sabinier at the Gods and Monsters conference a few weeks back and was delighted when he agreed to be our docent through this ancient and mysterious exhibit on Rakshasas.
Eric, I don’t know much about you personally.
Would you like to introduce yourself to the audience?
Just, yeah, briefly, I…
I have a master’s degree from Naropa University that I earned in the year 2000.
And since then, I’ve been working as a civil servant, raising a family, and kind of doing Buddhist studies as a hobby.
And the hobby really kind of ramped up during the COVID time.
I got very interested in a Dharma protector as part of my meditation practice.
started really asking questions about well who who is this person like outside of the lineage that i learned about her and that’s what led me to the monsters because her name is vatali and vatali is the feminine form of vatala which is an indian monster and that got me into the whole you know gods and monsters milus when i saw the advertisement for the conference i thought that’s perfect
I think I told Karen, I know I mentioned to you that I had come across Rakshasa’s primarily first through Kolchak the Night Stalker.
There’s a really great, I think it’s called Horror in the Heights.
I’ll probably put a clip in there for that.
But in that TV show…
it comes across as a very strange, shape-changing monster.
And the way they present it there is it presents itself to you, the victim, as someone you trust the most, and then it eats you, or tears you to shreds.
And then in Dungeons & Dragons, it came up as an occasional higher-level encounter with a magical shape-changer.
So shape-changing’s always in there.
I was unfamiliar with them.
I hadn’t heard of them.
So this is exciting.
New Monster is great.
That’s the funny part, though, Karen, is I thought of it as being an obscure thing.
And then, you know, in the IT world, I work with people from India all the time and happened to mention this.
And as you know, I thought of it as a folkloric kind of thing.
And.
No, no, it’s a very present and real lived experience kind of monster.
And I didn’t know that.
So I was curious about sort of that distinction between the mythic and the perceptually real.
And so I thought, you know, if Eric wants to take a stab at helping us sort of work through these mysteries, I’d really appreciate it.
So, yeah.
Anyway, welcome to Monster Talks, Eric.
Thank you.
Yeah, it’s very, very nice to be here.
Is it Zabinyi?
Yeah, yeah, pretty much.
I mean, there’s a lot of variations when you have all those consonants in there.
So Zabinyi, Zabinyi.
Can you tell us a little bit about these Rakshasas?
And yeah, how do we begin to learn about these creatures?
Well, you know, as Blake said, as Americans, we start off with D&D and Kolchak.
You know, I didn’t I was not familiar with that show, actually, which is really surprising to me, given all the television I watched growing up.
You know, I was born in 1970.
So.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So how I missed Kolchak, I don’t know.
But I did watch that episode several times.
And it’s really interesting how how close it is to the to the lore and yet how different the monster appears because it does.
It looks like a kind of like a Sasquatch type.
type monster, and you don’t find that really in the literature.
I’ll kind of get into how they’re described in the literature in a minute, but as far as D&D, I mean, that’s what we talked about at the conference.
You mentioned the Rakshasas, and I said, well, you shouldn’t get your information about Indian myth from the monster man.
I think I said the fiend folio, but yeah.
I certainly remembered that picture of the tiger headed.
My wife and I were kind of going back and forth.
Was it a tiger headed humanoid or was it just a tiger wearing a smoking jacket?
I think we could probably throw a picture in the show notes.
But yeah, the luxurious garb is definitely a part that’s come up in every exposure I’ve had to it in gaming.
Even though it’s a shape changer and often appears to be something else, eventually it comes down to smoking jackets and fez.
Yeah, I wonder where Gygax got that from.
I don’t know.
It makes me think of some representations of Satan.
you know, sometimes he’s this kind of charismatic character and, you know, like the Rolling Stones version.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I just, I wonder if it’s not, could potentially be influenced by that.
Yeah, it’s very interesting that you mentioned that, Karen, because, you know, there’s some disagreement in the D&D world about whether, you know, does a Rakshasa fit as a demon?
Because the alignment is lawful evil.
And that’s more typically the alignment of devils, not demons.
Okay.
So I think there is maybe some influence of the debonair devil that made it into that.
Smurf Satan.
Right, yes.
And for real, yeah.
I mean, they are, as a gaming encounter, my experiences with them have been, they’re very dangerous.
They’re very tricky.
They sort of fit that trickster role, which actually is something I wanted to talk about a little bit.
like jinn well like well and then of course jinn another great example of a monster or a creature that the western conception is i dream of genie and aladdin but in the islamic world they’re part of the quran they’re you know they’re made from smokeless fire people people widely believe in them you can find youtube videos of people thinking they’ve encountered them
But again, co-workers have talked to me about folklore.
We should actually talk about where they come from textually as well as mythically.
But I would say within present day folklore, there’s these belief…
The way it was described to me was someone who was alive and has too strong of an attachment to other living people.
When they pass, it might cause them to become a Rakshasa, which was not anything I ever saw in…
any of the writing.
So I thought that was an interesting sort of folk belief that you could end up becoming a rikshasa.
But I don’t know if you’ve run into that, but I am interested in, I guess, let me get to a question, which is what are the documents?
What are the written documents that bring us the story of these creatures?
Yeah, so the Rakshasa goes way back in Indian history to the very earliest text, the Rig Veda, which is about 1500 BC.
And it’s cognate with Avestan language.
So there’s some overlap there with the Zoroastrian.
religion but i think the earliest um recorded um you know that you find it in the literature is in the rig veda and they’re almost like spells that are cast or they’re like entities that are summoned by sorcerers to um to harass the vedic practitioners to disrupt the sacrifice
So it seems pretty clear that they are, you know, as the Aryans were migrating south into India and they were encountering the native Dravidians of the tribal folks who weren’t happy with them coming into their territory, these nomads following their flocks and practicing their Vedic sacrifices to their gods.
So they were.
the sorcerers would send rakshasas.
They were actually called rakshas in the earliest literature.
And the word has a dual meaning.
It can mean a guardian or one that causes damage or injures.
So they’re guarding their stuff and they injure those that are impeding or coming into their territory.
Yeah, that makes me think of early demons in Greek mythology.
as well, that they could be this kind of guardian angel character or demons as well, that demons weren’t necessarily evil.
That’s the Western perception that we have today.
We should probably explain what a Veda is as well for listeners.
Well, that’s the collection of texts.
So Vedic is an adjective that refers to the Vedas.
And these are texts, hymns, chants, mantras, not even more poem than narrative story.
And so the earliest Veda, the Rig Veda, as I said, dates back to about 1500.
And then you have additional Vedas that are composed over the course of the next half a century or so.
And then you start getting commentaries on the Vedas.
The Brahmanas are commentaries on the Vedas.
And then Upanishads are commentaries on the Brahmanas.
And the literature builds and builds.
Nothing really gets superseded.
So the Vedas are kind of the foundation.
So where did these sit?
I think, again, unfortunately, I’m limited to sort of my Western upbringing, but thinking about religious texts.
Are these all considered to be sacred?
I know some of them are for moral instruction, but I also know that it’s a little different from, say, Judeo-Christian world because…
Like, growing up in the South in an evangelical community, my parents thought it was really borderline blasphemous to name your kid Jesus, right?
But yet, in Indian culture, you constantly meet people who have been named after a variety of gods and mythic figures.
Interesting.
There’s something different, substantially different about the way that the people of today engage with this material beyond just a matter of moral guidance and faith.
It’s like, again, a very lived experience.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
Well, yeah, there’s fundamental differences between monotheistic and polytheistic cultures.
And you can’t even really say that India is strictly monotheist because they’re kind of like both end rather than either or.
And that’s why they kind of absorb.
They’re very…
amenable to innovation and to new things but it doesn’t mean that the old go goes away you know so the vedas is still the foundation you kind of like you know how the new testament for christians sort of like okay the old testament’s still there but like the new testament is new it’s the it’s the the it kind of supersedes it almost whereas in in in the hindu worldview and there isn’t just one hindu worldview any more than there’s you know anyone
Christian world or that kind of thing.
But there is that kind of overarching sense that Hinduism has room for all the gods.
Like this is our God that we’re worshiping today or our main God or whatever, but that can change in the course of the calendar.
And again, it’s a very pluralistic world view.
And I think if my reading is correct, that even the very concept that Hinduism is one thing is more of a, this is sort of a colonialist interpretation of the local religions.
Like this is all Hinduism, but that’s not actually necessarily how it was at the time.
And I don’t know how that’s evolved since the hated British have been kicked out, you
yeah but that’s that’s kind of how it is with religion in general you know the religion is a construct of the of the academy you know and it’s it’s a it’s a concept that’s very useful in comparing things that are similar but you know the the danger is to um you know neglect the differences in favor of the similarity
So with the Rakshasas, are they found in some of the sects of Hinduism?
I’m thinking like Krishna consciousness.
Well, yeah, so once you get into the period of the epics, so the Mahabharata and the Ramayana were composed in between like the second century BC through the second century CE.
And they’re kind of like the Iliad and the Odyssey.
They’re foundational texts that have these different characters, Rama and Krishna, the gods kind of come down to take part in human affairs.
And the Ramayana is actually full of rakshasas.
So the episode of Kolchak, when he goes to the museum and the museum curator guy is telling him what a rakshasa is, he says, well, he’s a disciple of Ravana.
The Rakshasa is the disciple of Ravana.
Ravana, whose deeds were so horrible, he stopped the sun and the moon in their course.
And that’s actually in this pronunciation.
It’s Ravana.
And so Ravana is like the king of the Rakshasas.
The whole point of the Ramayana is that Vishnu, one of the great Hindu gods, incarnates on earth as Rama so he can kill Ravana.
because Ravana has received a boon from Brahma, who’s this great creator God that kind of gives out boons to demons that impress him.
He causes a lot of trouble that way because he’s very powerful, but he’s kind of portrayed as not the wisest.
So he gave Ravana a boon that he couldn’t be killed by gods or demons or anything.
But Brahma says, but what about humans?
And Ravana says, humans are beneath contempt.
I don’t have to worry about them.
So Vishnu incarnates as Rama, who is a human.
So kind of like the man God, God incarnate.
And so the whole story is about how Rama overcomes Ravana.
And this is the little Lord of the Rings.
No man can slay him.
Exactly.
Very cool.
It is.
And that story is really interesting.
So in that story, Ravana, he’s an antagonist.
I shouldn’t say he’s a villain.
He’s an antagonist.
And there’s some aspects to him that seem a little tragic.
And this kind of comes to, I guess, much like with the djinn, although…
they’re very different entities.
It’s not always easy to pin down whether a Rakshasa is a bad or good, like, I don’t, do they have an inherent morality?
I don’t know.
It’s like, it seems like it depends on the story that they’re being covered.
Well, it is interesting because initially, so kind of the short answer to what is a raksasa is it’s a malevolent, flesh-eating, shape-changing human.
Always a meat eater.
Yeah, yeah.
Good point.
And not just meat.
I mean, I’m a meat eater too, but they eat humans.
That’s their favorite.
That’s their delicacy.
It’s not cannibalism if you’re not one.
Just bad humans or all humans?
Tasty.
Just humans.
That’s right.
Human bean juice.
Initially, they go after the Brahmin priests that are performing the sacrifice.
But then later on, they’re just kind of, I mean, in a way, they’re a personification of the bad things that can happen.
You know, they bring disease.
They, you know, if a woman has a miscarriage, well, that was because of a rakshasa.
And so then there’s ways to protect against them.
But then they kind of, you know, there’s a lot of demons in the Hindu world.
You know, they have pashachas and yakshas and nagas and all kinds of nasty things.
Well, I’m curious about how you can protect yourself.
So with things like amulets or rituals.
Epitropics.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so early on, because the rakshas, as they were called in the earlier texts, they were interfering with the sacrifice, Agni, the god of fire, who the sacrifice is made to, he was one of the most popular ways of, you’d invoke Agni to burn up the rakshasas, and you might invoke Indra or one of the other gods.
There’s also there are amulets.
There’s an herb that I can never remember the name of it.
I kind of think of it as like Ayurvedic king’s foil.
That’s what I was going to say.
It’s good for anything, right?
And so rakshasas were taken over in Buddhism as well.
And one of the ways of warding them off in the Lotus Sutra is to chant the names of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara.
So, you know, mantras can be effective.
Fire can be effective.
The crossbow, we should probably talk about the crossbow, the blessed crossbow bolt.
because that’s well we should because it shows up in in in the cold shack that’s really funny okay a crossbow is the method prescribed in legend by which one may destroy a rakshasa with arrows blessed by the divine brahma himself when the little man was trying to kill a rakshasa or thought he was
Yeah, and I think another little clue as to where he got that is when the museum curator tells him that the crossbow bolt that’s blessed by Brahma himself, there’s a weapon called the Brahmastra, which Rama uses against Ravana to kill him.
And so you have these celestial weapons.
Each of the gods has their own celestial weapon.
Shiva has a trident.
Vishnu has a discus.
Brahma has this thing.
It’s kind of like a fireball in a way.
You can see why Gary Gygax would love this stuff, because it’s got elevated weapons to deal with elevated dangers.
That’s right, that’s right.
So yeah, I mean, the crossbow just seemed like something that got pulled out of thin air, but because Rama uses a bow, and he affixes the brahmastra, the weapon of Brahma to the bow, and he uses that to kill Ravana.
So that would probably be the most effective way of protecting yourself against the Rakshasa, if you have one of those blessed crossbow bolts or Brahma’s weapon.
Neat.
Go ahead, Karen.
Sorry, go ahead.
I was just going to ask us, or…
Rakshasas, are they invariably male or can they be female or are they genderless?
So when we’re introduced to the Rakshasas in the Ramayana,
They are male and female.
And there’s different classes.
There can be good rakshasas and bad rakshasas.
There’s attractive rakshasas and deformed and hideous rakshasas.
So it really kind of mirrors human society in a lot of ways.
And I think that that’s kind of the point.
It’s like the shadow side or the mirror image, the negative image of human society.
And can they shapeshift like demons?
They can.
So there are Rakshasas by birth.
So there’s a kind of complicated genealogy that’s given.
And both the father and the mother’s side tie back to Brahma eventually, which kind of makes sense because he’s the creator, but in different ways.
And so initially the Rakshasas were, they seemed like they were kind of neutral, but then something got out of balance with…
I hate to say it, but it was on the mother’s side.
Something kind of seemed to have gone wrong.
And so this Rakshasa mother gave birth, but then she abandoned her maternal duties because she was drawn by her libidinous side.
So she basically went to have more sex and left the baby in the mountain.
Apparently the father was fine with it too, because he’s never…
He’s like, where’s Junior, you know?
Anyway, so the baby’s left crying in the mountains.
And Shiva and Parvati, so Shiva, one of the great, you know, one of the three great Hindu gods, he comes by with his wife, Parvati, and they see this crying baby.
And out of pity, they make the baby the same age as its mother.
And then Shiva, not content with that, makes him immortal.
and gives him this flying city.
So it’s like all these boons bestowed out of pity on this little Rakshasa baby.
And then Parvati ups the ante and extends this to the whole Rakshasa race.
All Rakshasas will be born the moment they’re conceived and they’ll be the same age as their mother.
So I came across some stuff when I was researching this episode that surprised me.
And I, I don’t know, this seems like a relatively new thing.
So apparently since about 2009, since the Sri Lankan civil war, there has been something called the Ravana movement in Sri Lanka, which, which is sort of inverting the Raksasa into a heroic figure.
And it specifically of interest to me,
not just because we’re covering Marxist, but because it also seems to be tying into that really popular alt-archaeology idea that the Vedas are talking about, an ancient civilization that had flying cities and nuclear bombs and lots of stuff that I think is just mythology, but everybody wants to do their Erich von Daniken number on it.
But it…
In Sri Lanka right now, this is a really important political movement.
I know that’s a little bit outside of what we normally talk about, but this is a direct monster crossover.
Can you help us unpack that?
Or do you know much about that?
Oh, definitely.
Yeah.
So Sri Lanka is a predominantly Buddhist country.
And Buddhism took over a lot of the demons from Hinduism.
So, you know, the gods of Hinduism were opposed to Buddhism.
And so if you think about it sociologically, like the Shaivites and the Vishnuvites were devotees of Shiva and Vishnu.
They were competing for patronage, for royal patronage and for converts.
And so they kind of wrote polemics against each other.
You know, one of Vishnu’s avatars was the Buddha, and he was sent to teach this false doctrine, so kind of vilifying Buddhism.
And then Buddhism wrote their own, some of the early tantras that shows Buddhist deities trampling on the Hindu deities.
So then you have, so if Ravana is an enemy of the Hindus, then maybe he’s our friend.
So they definitely co-op Ravana early on.
The Lankan Vantara Sutra and early Mahayana Sutra features Ravana.
He’s receiving this teaching from the Buddha.
Like I mentioned, the Lotus Sutra, which has Rakshasas that are Rakshasas and Rakshasis.
So that’s the female form.
And they become protectors in Buddhism.
And so, yeah, Ravana is…
Even in southern India.
So in parts of India, Ravana is burned in effigy every year to celebrate the victory of Rama over Ravana.
But as you go further south, Ravana is more of a culture hero.
And especially in Sri Lanka, he’s the first emperor and he defends the island against the invaders.
So yeah, definitely an inversion there.
There’s a number of inversions that go on as these tales evolve.
That is amazing.
Also, and this is a little irreverent, but I can’t help but think about this sounds like they settled some of their scores with rap battles.
It sounds like, you know, if you like that poem, take this, you know, here’s another one.
Here’s an epic poem for you.
So, yeah, that’s kind of neat.
I mean, obviously.
I’m sure these things probably carried a little bloodshed with them, too.
But it is kind of nifty to leave not just bloodshed, but also an epic poem.
Again, this is people’s lived experience.
I always have thought of these as being mythological creatures, and it was really surprising how present and right now a lot of these experiences and stories are.
So I want to be careful to not diminish this in the midst of mythology.
This is things that people deal with right now.
Speaking of which, I mean, obviously, my co-workers’ stories aside, do you know how…
the Rakshasa plays out in present day culture outside of the religious ecosystem?
Are people, do people have Rakshasa stories the same way people have demonic encounter stories, angelic and, uh, djinn type stories?
Have you, have you seen anything like that in your travels?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, um, you know, India is obviously a very religious country.
Um, you know, there’s, there’s a, I think, um,
80 to 80, over 80% are, you know, devout in some form or another, and some 40% believe in demons.
So they have similar experiences.
It’s not quite as high as in America, where it’s like, what, like 60 or 70% believe in the devil, definitely something that you hear stories about.
And sometimes they’re kind of interchangeable sometimes, like Rakshasas, Vaitalas, Yakshas, they sort of blend into each other.
You know, there’s a lot of belief in ghosts.
You know, there’s a big
a big belief in the ancestors so when someone dies they become a preta or a ghost and then if they’re properly taken care of after death if you know the proper ceremonies are performed then the praetor eventually becomes a peter or an ancestor and they go to the land of the ancestors but then you also have the doctrine of karma which you know they don’t see a contradiction there
They kind of make it all work.
And like I said earlier, instead of either or, it’s to sort of end both.
But I wanted to get back to something that Karen said.
I didn’t actually finish answering the question in terms of shape-shifting.
So it seems that the born Rakshasa, along with most gods and demons, has the ability to shape-shift.
one can become a rakshasa through a curse.
And I think you mentioned that towards the beginning of the podcast, Blake, being cursed to be a rakshasa.
And this happens quite a lot.
There’s a couple of almost humorous stories in the Ramayana where Rama comes across, Rama and his brother Lakshma come across this horrible, huge, like one looks like a blemy, like a cyclops blemy with the face and the body.
The face and the torso, yeah, yeah.
That’s right.
That’s right.
And so they have this big battle and then they chop off its arms and then suddenly it says, oh, you must be Rama.
I just remembered, you know, when I was cursed, I was told the curse would be lifted when Rama came by and chopped off my arm.
So thank you.
You’ve lifted the curse.
Those ones are stuck with their form.
They don’t get to shape change.
They’re transformed into horrific, you know, man-eating beasts, and they’re stuck that way until their curse is lifted.
But thankfully, there usually is an end to the curse.
Earlier, you had name-dropped Vitaly, and I am on a bit of a female monster kick at the moment for something I’m working on.
I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about her.
Oh, yeah, I could tell you a lot about Vitality.
I first encountered her through Trungpa Rinpoche, the founder of Naropa University.
um he kind of i feel like he sort of discovered a new form of a tally of a forearmed form um you know in the tradition she is um she appears in tantras when a group of yoginis a group of eight yoginis that go back they appear in the tibetan book of the dead they tally kind of
In the course of the development of the religion, she kind of becomes an independent goddess, and she becomes quite wrathful in the tantric version that is presented by Trungpa Rinpoche.
She rides on a donkey.
She’s related to Sri Devi.
Probably if you’re researching monstrous goddesses, you’ve probably heard of Sri Devi, also known as Paldan Lama in her Tibetan name.
Yeah, I don’t know too much at this point.
But, yeah, this is all interesting.
I mean, there’s just many, many female monsters and they do often just seem to have a different flavour to the male monsters, especially when it comes to demons.
And so, yeah, I was just curious to hear more about her.
And, yeah, I mean, there are a lot of, I think, variations on a theme too across different traditions.
You see the same character but just in a different costume, different name.
Yeah, that’s one of the interesting things about the Tibetan protectors is they originate in India.
And for the most part, I mean, there’s worldly protectors and then there’s the kind of super mundane protectors that are typically, they come out of Indian Tantra.
So, you know, and then they have many manifestations.
And I think that’s one of the most fascinating things is how different can a manifestation be and still be considered to be ultimately Tara or Avalokiteshvara or what have you.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
In preparing the episode, I came across the story of Puttana, who is a rickshasa.
And this is amazing to me.
So she’s going to try to kill Krishna when he’s a baby.
And she offers him poisonous breast milk.
But then Krishna drains her dry and kills her, which is just the most wicked…
Cool.
I mean, look, I, you know, I just, I love a good mythology story, but the, I’m going to kill you with my breast milk and then you get sucked dry like a husk.
That’s just, ah, it’s wicked.
So cool.
One thing I really like about stories like that is that that’s not the end of the story for Putana is because then she is resurrected and she becomes a devotee of Krishna and a protector of his teachings.
Well, she knows he’s a badass.
I mean, when we asked you on, I felt like it’s a big pie to bite into, right?
There’s a lot here.
And I feel like the many gods of Hinduism in the many, many stories, I feel so inadequately informed.
Like, it was only fairly recently I heard that, like, I realized that The Legend of Bagger Vance is a retelling of the Bhagavad Gita.
And it’s like, what?
What, a golf movie?
It’s like there’s so much Hindu culture that I’ve run into but not recognized it for what it was.
You know, it’s just kind of… And then…
There was this period in the 60s and 70s when, well, that’s been actually multiple times, I think, going back to theosophy.
And a lot of Western esotericism sort of dips into Indian religions as well.
And I say India, but that whole region.
Excuse me.
But let’s assume that I think it’s a fair assumption that most of our audience here is not well-versed in this material.
contextually, these creatures, the raksasa, fit into this Hindu culture and this Hindu religion, I guess is what I should say.
I’m just trying to figure out where they fit.
And again, analogy-wise, compared to angels and demons and jinn and some of these other not-quite-gods, definitely not-quite-people, that sort of…
magical role i just i’m trying to place them narratively in the context of this mythology i guess that’s what i’m trying to do what what role do they play within most of these narratives my sense is that the ramayana is kind of like the the peak you know it’s it’s where you have you know rakshasas are the main antagonists whether it’s ravana himself
And that’s Ravana.
Right.
Exactly.
OK, cool.
Yeah.
So you’ve got King Ravana and then you’ve got all these other players that are fascinating.
I mean, so many fascinating incidents.
You have Ravana’s sister who, you know, she kind of kicks things off by she sees Rama and she falls in love with them.
And Rama kind of teases her.
And then because she’s.
She’s out of place in her, you know, a woman shouldn’t be so forward.
They actually cut off her nose and her ears and send her away.
And that was like a standard punishment back in medieval times if a woman committed adultery or attempted to.
And then she tells her brother, hey, you know, guess what happened?
But it’s not Ravana’s desire to defend his sister.
It’s because she describes Rama’s wife Sita as like the most beautiful woman in the world.
And Ravana…
And she knew she would excite Ravana’s lust and he would go after and grab Sita.
So this whole story is how the god came to earth, became a man to defeat this undefeatable Rakshasa.
He’s the king of the Rakshasas.
He can’t be defeated.
I have the sense that after he was defeated, that the Rakshasas kind of, they lost a lot of their clout.
I think you just explained the story better than what I had read.
That’s the key there.
It cannot be defeated by anybody, by a god.
So take the form of a man and then suddenly, you know, that’s, of course, that’s a common motif within mythology or within religions.
The god who takes on human form and then through that gets a transcendent power.
So that’s neat.
That’s really cool.
Wow.
It’s such a complicated story.
And earlier, Eric, you mentioned meditation.
Do these creatures come into meditation in any way, shape or form?
Well, they certainly do when they’re incorporated into the Buddhist tradition.
You know, as I said, the Rakshasas kind of become protectors and protectors are important to help the practitioner to maintain their discipline and
know traditionally they um are invoked to destroy obstacles so um you know it gets into kind of esoteric territory where you know one um you know the one of the um
One of the big tantric figures, Yamantaka, the ender of death, one of his forms is rakshasa-headed.
And something about that wrathfulness is necessary in order to cut through our stubborn delusions and egotism.
Well, I want to say you’ve done a fantastic job of answering pretty much every question I had about Rakshasas and giving us a really great context, including the very important information for how to kill them.
That’s obviously…
Yes, very necessary.
We should have, throughout the entire course of this show, always…
Maybe monsters aren’t real, you know, but just in case, here’s how you kill them.
Pascal’s wager.
That would have been really smart.
In the various depictions of Rick Shasa that are out there, and obviously I’ll put some pictures in the show notes and some links in the show notes.
Is there any that you feel like is your favorite?
Where did you find your go-to Rick Shasa story or image?
Yeah, I think that, so Ravana is a 10-headed, originally his name is Dashagriva, the 10-headed or the 10-necked one.
And he’s named Ravana after he, in his haughtiness, he tries to take on Shiva and Shiva kind of like presses him down with his foot and Dashagriva starts just screaming.
And so he’s like, oh, you scream really nice.
I think I’ll call you Ravana, which means the howler, you know, or the…
The ravening one.
But yeah, I think the image of the 10-headed Ravana, because at one point to get his power, he cuts his heads off one by one and offers them into the fire.
And then when he’s about to cut the last head off, then Brahma comes and he says, wow, that was some amazing austerities there.
I’m going to give you a boon.
And thankfully, one of the boons is I’ll restore your heads.
Nice.
Yeah.
It’s like wishing for more wishes at the last thing, right?
You’ve done a great job, Eric.
Thank you for coming to talk to us about this fascinating creature.
Very fun topic.
And yeah, I mean, so much more to learn too, I think.
Eric, you have listened to the show, so you’re familiar with our signature question, but what’s your favorite monster?
Yeah, so yeah, I’ve definitely got a favorite, and it’s related to Vitaly.
It is the Vatala.
Nice.
There you go.
And I do feel, you know, I wish I could have had, you know, I delivered a paper on Vitaly at the Gods and Monsters Conference.
So I should have been able to answer your question a little bit better, Karen.
And I haven’t, I didn’t prepare a, like the elevator version of who is Vitaly.
So, you know.
No worries.
That was a, yeah, that came out of left field.
Now I was just curious, and I’m going to have to look into the character more myself.
But for audience members who may have missed your talk, what is the Vateli?
So Vateli is the feminine form of Vatela.
And so when I started looking into this, I was like, well, why is she called that?
And so Vatela translates as vampire.
And it’s actually a mistranslation by Sir Richard Francis Burton when he translated a number of texts.
He sure did.
He’s 1001 Ravian Nights, famously.
This is the 25 Tales of the Vatala, and he chose vampire.
and um you know it’s kind of been um kind of stuck in the crawl a lot of sanskritists because it’s it’s not a very good translation it doesn’t really represent what the vetala is or does but it got me really interested in trying to find out
you know more about that what what is a vetella what are the tails um you know what what can they do and and they’re pretty fascinating uh creatures um and just like the rakshasa they’re not you can’t really say it’s any one thing because if you look at one period in the literature it looks like this you know it looks maybe like um you know almost like a zombie which is how some scholars prefer to translate vetella so again another monster
You know, what is a zombie?
It’s something that just kind of does manual labor.
You know, a sorcerer can kind of command it to do this or that.
But later in the literature, Vatelas are almost like djinn.
They’re almost like, you know, there’s the 25 stories of the Vatela where this king has to retrieve this body that’s inhabited by a Vatela.
and bring it to the sorcerer because he’s made a contract.
And every time the king says a word to the Vitella, it goes flying back to the tree off the king’s back, and he has to go back and grab it again.
And so the Vitella tells stories to the king.
to pass the time.
And at the end of it, he tells the king that you have to give a true answer to this question if you know the answer.
If you don’t, your head will split in pieces.
But the king also knows that if he says anything, that the hell is going to go back to the tree.
So he’s kind of in this bind.
So I won’t spoil the end of the story, but it’s more than just a zombie.
It’s a very interesting character.
Like I said, more like a jinn.
Wow.
Yeah, I’m wondering about that translation then.
Is it just this fellow thought it was a cognitive vampire by Tali just because of the sounds in the word?
Yeah, it’s actually…
It’s not exactly known.
So Burton was, he knew Bram Stoker.
It seems like there was some cross-pollination there, but there’s no- Right, some influence, yeah.
Yeah, there’s no smoking gun yet.
People have been looking for it, and that’s one of my projects at this point.
I don’t expect to find it, but I do intend to kind of summarize the scholarship on it and see what it looks like.
And does it make sense to even translate this?
Maybe some things shouldn’t be translated.
Yeah.
That’s what Burton’s wife thought.
He has one of the coolest tombs.
His tomb is crafted after the style of an Arabic traveling tent.
It’s really beautiful.
Wow, where is it?
Sir Richard and Lady Burton are buried in the churchyard of St. Mary Magdalene Roman Catholic Church, Mortlake, in the London borough of Richmond-on-Thames.
I’ll put a link in the show notes to give you more information and to give you photos of that amazing tomb.
But I know that his wife was a little annoyed when Burton got around.
He got around and she burned a lot of his stuff and tried to suppress a lot of his writing stuff because there’s a lot of sexual content to his work.
That was not really a little, little.
inappropriate for the victorian times right but uh people people have been getting up to this sex stuff for nearly a hundred years now and uh so anyway that that’s another story but uh yeah yeah very interesting uh beautiful tomb very interesting character and a great answer thank you so much eric
Yes.
Yeah.
And keep in touch with us about the research you’re doing as well.
Yeah, for sure.
Find out more.
Thank you so much indeed for coming to talk to us because you’ve helped erase a big pile of ignorance.
That is a useful thing to do.
And I appreciate it.
This was a lot of fun.
I really appreciate being on the show.
Thank you.
Have a great night.
Have a good weekend.
Take care.
Good night, guys.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard an interview with academic researcher Eric Sabinier introducing us to the fascinating monsters called Rakshasas.
Check the show notes for lots of additional reading if you want to continue your Rakshasa recon.
Hey, a little bit of bookkeeping.
No pun intended.
Karen’s new book has dropped.
It’s called Beyond Words, How We Learn, Use, and Lose Language.
What is language really?
Where did it come from?
And how did we figure it out?
How do babies go from babbling to speaking full sentences?
Why can some people juggle multiple languages while others wrestle with one?
How does language work?
And what happens when it doesn’t?
With sharp insight and a sense of humor, Stolzno dives into the strange and endlessly fascinating world of language and the mind.
From animal communication to AI, wild children to word slips, and first words to last, this book takes you deep into the science of psycholinguistics where nothing is ever simple and everything speaks volumes.
Packed with pop culture, real-life cases, and eye-opening experiments, Beyond Words reveals how we learn, use, and lose language, and what it all says about being human.
If you’ve ever fumbled for a word or feared forgetting your own name, this thoughtful, surprising book is for you.
Check out the new Monster Talk Live, June 13th at 8 p.m. Eastern.
You go to youtube.com forward slash monster talk and watch me and Karen and Matt Baxter tackle the Chinnery Backseat Ghost, a very famous ghost photograph, which we’re going to dig into.
8 p.m. June 13th, youtube.com forward slash monster talk.
Monster Talk’s theme music is by Pete Stealing Monkeys.
I don’t always get to talk about Kolchak and Dungeons & Dragons on this show, but it always cheers me up when it’s appropriate to do so.
This has been a Monster House presentation.
Decadence, moral decline.
I see, in other words, they might be getting their marching orders right now.

The post S05E34 – Rakshasas appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsIn this episode we look at the history of the Vampire in folklore and literature with professor Nick Groom – aka “The Prof of Goth.”

Links related to Professor Groom:
The Vampire: A New History by Nick Groom (affiliate link)

Nick Groom – University of Macau faculty page – NickGroom@um.edu.mo

University of Exeter faculty page – N.Groom@exeter.ac.uk

Times Literary Supplement – articles by Nick Groom

Author’s page at Simon & Schuster

Interview with The One Ring about Groom’s Tolkien scholarship

Articles at Literary Hub by Groom

Some Vampire Links:

The Vampyre – John Polidori (Full Text – 1819)

The Black Vampyre: A Legend of St. Domingo (Full Text – 1819) (affiliate link) – wiki

Varney the Vampire: Or the Feast of Blood (Full Text – 1847) (affiliate link) – wiki

Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (Full Text – 1872) (affiliate link) – wiki

Dracula by Bram Stoker (Full Text – 1897) (affiliate link) – wiki

Vampire Panics (1790s – 1890s)

The Ackermansion

This episode brought to you by Factor Meals – use our link or code MonsterTalk50 to 50% off your first order!

| Transcript by REVAnnouncer (00:07):Monster House presents.(00:13):It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.(00:18):A giant hairy creature, part Inness, a 24 mile long bottomless lake in the Highlands of Scotland, a creature known as the LochnessBlake Smith (00:51):Monster talk. Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters. I’m Blake Smith.Karen Stollznow (00:59):And I’m Karen StollznowBlake Smith (01:01):Here at Monster Talk Manner. Every day is part of the spooky season, but even we can’t deny that. As autumn rolls in and the leaves turn, blood stain red and the pumpkin spice begins to fill our veins. We do get a bit excited. Speaking of blood, looks like we’re going to be focusing on our favorite blood sucking creatures from legend and lore this year, starting with this very informative discussion with today’s guest. Nick Groom is a professor of literature in English at the University of Macau and previously held positions at the universities of Bristol at Stanford, university of Chicago, and at Exeter. And he’s the author of the Vampire, A New History from Yale University Press among many others. Join us now as we discuss the history of vampires on Monster. DoKaren Stollznow (01:53):Welcome to the show, professor Nick Groom.Nick Groom (01:56):Thank you. Very good to be here.Karen Stollznow (01:59):So I’ll have to give a little bit of background story on how I found you. We have a number of vampire related projects, which are going on at the moment. So I think the Halloween season is going to be very vampire oriented for our show. That’s a big topic for our listeners. They love this subject. And I was watching a number of videos on vampires on YouTube in particular, let’s Talk Religion and Esoterica, and they kept mentioning you and they kept mentioning your book, the Vampire, a New History, and people are saying this is the definitive book on vampire history. And so unfortunately Blake and I haven’t had time to read all of the book yet, but we both have copies and we know our listeners are going to really love this book. And so I wanted to bring you on the show. You’re known as the Prof of Goth, and you’re a professor of literature in English at the University of Macau, are you not? That’sNick Groom (03:00):Correct, yes.Karen Stollznow (03:01):Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us. And yeah, we just wanted to talk about vampires, I guess in a general way with you. And I’m just wondering, there are quite a few books on the topic. It’s very popular. So what inspired you to tackle the topic of vampires and how is your book different to the others out there?Nick Groom (03:22):Yeah, thank you, Karen. That’s a fair question. I came to vampires through an interest, obviously in the Gothic. I wrote a book called A Very Short Introduction to the Gothic, and that was based on some research I did right at the beginning of my career in which I realized that there was actually a history to the Gothic before gothic literature. So the Gothic was a thing in architecture, obviously, but also in politics more than a hundred years before we get to the Gothic novel. And I got very interested in that early history. In fact, even before the first gothic novel has been published, you have people say, we’ve had enough of the gothic. We don’t want any more gothic, let’s move on from it. So not realizing that it was about to explode and become this abiding form. So I then wrote an essay about the early history of vampires, and that got me very interested in what vampires are really doing, how they’re being represented and figured and used in the early period in the 18th century rather than the whole Dracula and post Dracula vampire. And again, it is a very interesting history. So my book is really looking at vampires mainly from the 18th century up to Dracula. And then everything changes with Dracula,(04:58):But there’s a very rich history which only gets into literature and culture fairly late. So vampires are being discussed by medical researchers, by philosophers, by theologians, by political scientists, and it takes nearly a hundred years before the vampire is then taken up by literature. So that’s the first thing about the book. The second thing is this, I focus on when vampires are called vampires. It’s not a history of every blood sucker across the globe. I mean, that would be a huge and impossible project because every civilization probably has had blood suckers at some points in their sort of superstitious or mythological history. So I focus on the moment where vampires are called vampires, and that happens at a very specific moment, happens in 1725, and that’s when researchers from the Habsburg Empire and medical team go and investigate why corpses are being exhumed and staked in at the borders of the empire in Serbia. And that’s when the word is first used, and that’s the beginning of the whole western and then global fascination with vampires as vampires rather than just as blood sucking monsters.Blake Smith (06:31):That is fascinating to me. So you’ve got a folklore vampire and there’s a transition that happens after Dracula. So I know we’re going to want to talk about that because I’ve been doing a lot of research on werewolves and there’s sort of a similar thing that happens where you have the folklore werewolf and then it’s kind of late, honestly. You get an early 20th century sort of rise in the werewolf short story, and then ultimately you get the Wolfman, and that sort of cements the pop culture version of the werewolf. I can’t really think of a comparable werewolf novel to Dracula that there was never a book so much as, but the movie really did that sort of job. So in doing this book though, you had to go back and do research. So how did you approach the research for the book? What sort of resources did you use? Because it seems like you’re tackling both a sort of literary view and also a historical view.Nick Groom (07:32):Yes, but I was very surprised how late the vampire gets into literature. So focusing on the 18th century, that’s where I began my career as an academic was looking at 18th century literature. I realized that the vampires were being referred to in all sorts of ways. So it’s used as a way of criticizing politicians, financiers, even people like book setters. So it becomes a general term of condemnation and criticism for those who are exploiting others. And you end up with a very rich history about how the vampire is being really deployed by these commentators, whether it’s talking about allies of political power in Eastern Europe, whether it’s criticizing investors who are speculating, whether it’s criticizing landlords. For example, the British in Ireland are called vampires for their landlords policies. The British in America, they’re called vampires for taxing without allowing political representation. So I got very interested in that and just trace the history of the word.(09:00):And it’s not really until you get to the beginning of the 19th century, that’s nearly a hundred years before Dracula that people start introducing the vampire as a figure into literature. And that happens as a passing reference in a number of poems. Then poems begin to concentrate on the vampire, and then the vampire becomes a character. In 1819, John William Polidori publishes a short story called The Vampire, and that focuses on the vampire being this sort of sentient, independent, malicious, manipulative aristocrat. And that’s a game changer that really opens the gates for all sorts of writers to use the vampire as this character in a whole range of different stories. And so leading up to Dracula, we have, we’ve already got a vampire craze, we’ve got vampires being represented in all sorts of different ways and stories now, mainly in short stories, but also in poems, and it’s still being used in political commentary, in theological debate. And so you get a very rich and diverse culture, all sorts of different vampires before we get them to Dracula.Karen Stollznow (10:34):Well, you’ve said so many interesting things just then, so many things I want to unpack, but one of them is you mentioned Polidori, and I’ve heard that he stole the story from Lord Byron or took part of the story from Lord Byron. What’s the truth there underpinning that?Nick Groom (10:55):That’s a very good question, and in fact, it’s something on which I’ve actually rewritten the history of the Pori vampire. What happens is that Byron Lord Byron romantic poets had already mentioned vampires in one of his poems in the shower, and he refers to vampires occasionally in his verse. He actually describes the Liberty Royal family as Vampiric.(11:26):Oh,(11:27):Famously, he spent the summer of 1816 in a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. The weather in Britain was terrible. In fact, the weather across the whole, the world was terrible because there’d been a volcanic eruption the year before that put ash into the atmosphere.Blake Smith (11:47):Oh yeah.Nick Groom (11:48):So that’s Mount Tambore probably familiar with that. So Byron goes to Switzerland thinking that things will be better there. Of course, things are no better there. He travels there with his servant, but also with John William Polidori, who’s his physician. So Polidori occupies this ambiguous position. He’s both a friend of Byron, but also is working for him. And while they’re there, they’re visited by Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin, who later becomes Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein and her half sister Claire Claremont. And they spend the summer of 1816 in this villa telling ghost stories to each other. Now, Byron suggests that having competition to writes ghost stories, and that’s where Frankenstein comes from.(12:40):Now, Byron himself starts telling a story, writes half of it down, and then just finishes the rest of its really by the fireside and Polidori writes a different story called ESUs Burke told, which is later published anyway, then they split at the end of the summer Polidori travels and eventually returns to England. Now my reading of what happens next, although Polidori’s own account differs, but I’ve gone back through letters and unpublished material, so this is really the correct story Polidori becomes very friendly with the publisher, Henry Coburn and sets up a sort of a whole strategy to publish a number of works. Coburn’s particularly interested in the time that’s poly historically, Byron, because Byron’s a sort of super celebrity. Everybody wants to know every little detail, every incident of Byron’s life,Blake Smith (13:46):Mad, bad and dangerous to know if memory serves.Nick Groom (13:49):Absolutely. Lady Caroline Lamb described him, but he was an object of extraordinary fascination for the reading public. Now at the beginning of 1819, a translation of the German writer Gier, a translation of his poem, the Bride of Corinth, which is about a vampire, is published in a rival magazine. And I think what happens next is that Henry Henry Cobin, the publisher and his editor Arik Watts, and talking to Paula Dory, and I said, didn’t you mention that Byron was telling a vampire story? And Paula Dory then writes his own version of that story. Now it’s based on a memory that he has from some two and a half years earlier. So not really very similar to what we know of Byron’s story,(14:50):But he writes his own version. He’s very careful to say that this is inspired by Byron’s own version. It is not my original work. However, it then publishes being bylaw Byron. So then there’s a scandal. Byron is extremely annoyed, all of Byron, his friends are, and it really, ultimately, Paula Dory of course, is also very upset about it because it’s not how he presented it and it eventually destroys his literary career. But that’s the story. The vampire, I’d say it’s 70% Po Dora’s work probably 20% of the work of his editor, Arik Watts, 10% Byron. And this route then runs on for months and months, and it continues to be published as being bylaw. Byron, in fact, to go back to the German poet, Gier said, oh, it’s the best thing that Byron’s ever written. Love it. Those commentations disagree. But that’s the beginning of vampire literature in Britain and also in fact in North America, because within weeks there’s an American story called the Black Vampire, which is published as a sort of direct response to Podo is,Blake Smith (16:17):Wow, that’s fast. So how has the vampire evolved over time? In my head, I have this sort of picture of the vampire in folklore as being very monstrous, but in these stories, they take on more human characteristics in a way that doesn’t seem to be part of the folklore, if I’m reading it right.Nick Groom (16:37):Yeah, that’s very interesting, Blake. Certainly the way that that historians have thought about the vampire developing has always been, well, they start off as East European peasants. They’re more like zombies. They shamble out of the grave and go and murder their nearest and dearest and that then it is not until hoori turns the vampire into an aristocrat that they become much more cultured and sort of these thinking creatures. And that’s not true. The minutes that the vampire emerges from Eastern Europe, it’s being described as running across the whole social spectrum to the very first discussion of vampires in a British, in the British press compares them with corrupt aristocrats, royal pretenders, favorites of the king parasites, in other words. So they’re immediately seen as running all the way up a social scale, and that’s consistent throughout the 18th century. So vampires, as I said, are seen as finances. They’re seen as being entrepreneurs. They’re seen as being offices in the army. They’re seen as being c clergymen, even I think it’s in Poland, one of the royal princesses is described as a vampire.Blake Smith (18:22):I’m a little curious though, I mean I could see where this would have appeal in the 18 hundreds, but the idea of some rapacious parasitic person who seems to have high status but really contributes nothing to society and merely drains it, that has no relevance today, does it?Karen Stollznow (18:40):I know where you’re going. It’s absolutely everyNick Groom (18:44):Relevance. I think what I’m trying to say is that they run across the whole sort of social spectrum, but they’re also very diverse, particularly when you get to the 19th century after Polidori’s story, the vampire isn’t fixed, it doesn’t become this sort of decayed aristocrat doesn’t become settled and static as the old order. You get a whole range of vampires that are from the Middle Ages in Irish history, vampires that are very contemporary, very medical. There’re women living in isolation are very socially mobile. They are occupied every particular position. So don’t, they’re not a settled version. There’s not like a static version. You can imagine a vampire in all sorts of different situations. And that’s what really excites storytellers. I think it excites short story writers and novelists to really imagine the vampire occupying these different places and reacting and interacting with people in a whole variety of different ways. So it does become a figure that isn’t defined by specific characteristics. Those just gradually become associated with the creature. It’s something which I call a thought experiment. It’s very good to think about the nature of what it is to be human, how humans can relate to other species questions about the spread of disease and contagion, questions about mortality and immortality. It becomes a very useful lightning rod if you like, to try to make sense of some of the big questions about, say, human development, human identity or the nature of(21:00):Being.Karen Stollznow (21:05):And so Nick, you’ve touched upon some of the, that you researched some of the underlying medical explanations for the real life cases of vampires. Could you go into a little bit more detail about that? I’ve heard people attributing VAMs to things like TB consumption, tuberculosis or rabies or other diseases. Can you talk to that a little bit for us?Nick Groom (21:32):Yeah, sure. So vampires are usually associated with sudden outbreaks of fatal disease, and that sort of seems to be one of the reasons for the development of the legends and stories concerning the creature. So you’ve got to remember that the 18th and the first half of the 19th century people did not understand how diseases were spread. So particularly in the case of really profoundly unpleasant and fatal diseases such as cholera, they were absolutely terrifying. They spread with this awful rapidity. They reduced victims to abject to an abject states very, very swiftly. So they were incomprehensible. So in fact, the supernatural explanation was as reasonable as any explanation. And it’s only by the middle of the 19th century, Dr. John Snow investigates the spread of cholera in London begins to understand how it’s actually spread. But before then, vampire is pretty much as good an explanation as anything is.(22:55):You’re talking about a time when people thought that disease could be spread by words. If you actually heard somebody who was infected, if you heard them speak, they could infect you by sight. If an infected person looked at you, they could infect you. So doctors would actually blindfold their patients so they couldn’t be seen by them. So there’s a real sort of uncomprehending fear about the spread of fatal disease and vampires become part of that. They become scapegoats, if you like. And the interesting thing is this whole sort of medical dimension then survives throughout 19th century vampire stories that you very often have doctors as key personnel in the stories who are trying to analyze Vampirism, trying to explain it. And that then moves into areas such as psychology and psychiatry as well, when we get to people believing that they’re vampires are acting in vampiric ways.Blake Smith (24:09):So this is a weird question, but I think modern audiences tend to think of vampires as sort of suave and powerful and sexy monsters. But in Dracula, there’s sort of a xenophobia at play that might be lost on modern readers. And I’m wondering, do you think Stoker intended that xenophobia or did he want the monster to be sexy, or is that a modern thing that’s been tacked on? Would he even recognize what people have done with vampires? Do you think?Nick Groom (24:37):That’s very interesting. I mean, certainly Paul Dora’s vampire from 1819 is seen as being ruthlessly is a ruthless sexual predator Lord ribbon in that story. But the actual sexual side of the vampire is something which is a much more 20th century. I think that although you certainly get seductive vampires in the 19th century, something which I should really emphasize is that most vampires that appear in literature in the 19th century in Britain and North America are female. So the whole idea of the male vampire, it’s certainly something that runs through Paula Dory, a book called Vanney the Vampire in Dracula. But(25:26):Most vampires of that period are female vampires like Carmilla. Right, exactly. And then Carmilla, the Vampire is extremely seductive, very sensual, very erotic, and there are a number of follow-up stories to that in which vampires become these very sexually alluring female female figures. So certainly Brown Stoker would’ve been aware of that tradition, and he spent seven years researching vampires before he wrote Dracula. The main thing about the 19th century vampire is not that it’s sectionalized, but that it’s about fears of consumption because we’re dealing in a very capitalist consumer commercial society in which there’s a great deal of debate about the exploitation of the laboring classes. In fact, Karl Marx uses vampire imagery a lot in his work and about responsibility to the poor and so forth about people being turned into objects. And there’s no more terrifying way of being turned into an object than being turned into nutrition, being turned into food for another creature, this sort of semi human creature.(26:56):So I think that the fear is very much to do with do with that rather than to do with the sexually charismatic vampire or even to do with xenophobia. As you just mentioned, the xenophobic issue with Dracula is more to do with attitudes towards Eastern Europe. Some critics have suggested that it’s about colonized people striking back at the homeland. In other words, those on the fringes of the British empire returning as monsters to attack Britain. That’s not really the case because Dracula is very clearly in Eastern Europe in Sylvania. He’s had a long history. He, he’s, he’s well Aiken nobility part of orthodox Christianity there. So it’s really about removed fears. It’s not so much about those home fears about the return of the oppress. It’s thinking more generally about the nature of difference and the threats that a more global political situation might pose to the home country. When Dracula does get to Britain, I mean, among many other things, which I think it’s always worth rereading directly, it has so much in it. It’s a very unexpected book. You invest in real estate.Blake Smith (28:46):Yes, he does.Nick Groom (28:48):So’s very, very good at that. In fact, at one point, I think Jonathan Harkey said that he would make a good solicitor, he’d make a good lawyer because he knows all about things like international trade, import duty, but most importantly about how to manage contracts. And he buys the biggest house he can, which is as close to bucking palace as it can be. So if he really wants to get to the heart of power. So he’s more like an invading force. He’s trying to influence and disrupt British politics, I think. So if it is xenophobic, it is more to do with the fear of invasion from another power. But then of course, he remains very solitary. He has very few allies. He’s a lone wolf, he’s got renfield and he’s got the brides of Dracula, but most of the time he’s working alone. So he’s more like a sort of terrorist assassin, I think, than he is representing a whole nation.Karen Stollznow (29:59):Well, yeah, that’s just such a fascinating answer, and I think I want to go a little bit more lighthearted than xenophobia. So I think a lot of people associate vampires with blood and blood sucking. But in your book, you talk about some unexpected things. You link vampires to potatoes and pumpkins and watermelons. Can you tell us a little bit about what these fruits and vegetables had to do with vampires?Nick Groom (30:33):Certainly Easter, European superstition links, vam purism to, but basically to decay. So if you leave something like a pumpkin for more than I think 10 days, they say that it will turn vampire. In other words, it’s going to go up and bite you. But it does. I mean, it’s absolutely true. I mean, I’ve left a pumpkin for 10 days after Halloween and does something to a vampire and my children will.(31:07):The point I making about the potato has actually been confirmed since I wrote the book in a strange way. I got interested in how we use images from the natural world and the difference between bread and potatoes. Carbohydrates and bread is made from wheats and golden wheat, which is outside of the sunshine, but potatoes are underground and they have a particular look to them. They’re white, they’re shriveled, they’re like some depictions of vampires. In fact, there is a German short story that was then translated into English, which is included in the next book that I’m doing, which confirms that it says, yeah, vampires are like root vegetables. They live under the grounds, they’re shriveled, they’ve got unknown properties rather unexpectedly. That rather sort of frivolous comparison has been confirmed. But there’s a more serious side to it though, which is that Bram Stoker is Anglo-Irish.(32:19):And one of the things that I think Dracula is about, is about the way that the Irish are treated by the British and a Protestant ascendancy and absentee landlords, and that covers things like the great famine that was caused by potato bite and ensuing problems, terrible health problems in Ireland. And so the idea of this terror emerging from the ground, in other words, diseased potatoes, which means you’re not going to be able to eat, I think is more serious this soon. You’ve also touched on something else, which you said you wanted to lighten the mood. There’s not a great deal of vampire comic literature in the 19th century except on the stage where vampires are used in very sort lighthearted performances. They’re used in sort of burlesque, in fares, in pantomimes. So there was at the same time, this comic tradition, and that gets into a very interesting story by somebody called Sabin Bearing Gult.Blake Smith (33:39):Ooh, I know his work. He wrote one of the definitive books on werewolves. Yeah,Nick Groom (33:43):Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Which is Stoker. So he wrote the book of werewolves. He wrote a story called Ry of Qua about a vampire, and when Dracula was published, it was compared with a number of works including Marjorie of Que. So Dracula is definitely in that context, and Marjorie of Cue is a comic vampire story. It’s got a very serious sort of edge to it. It’s a very interesting short story that I’d recommend of your listeners to read, but it also has this sense of humor that runs through it. It’s really a cross between early folk horror and vampire comedy.Blake Smith (34:28):It’s funny, this reminds me of the weirdest thing. In 1997, I took a road trip across the United States to go look at various paranormal and UFO related places because I was very curious, sort of put my feet down, and I guess it is what they now call dark tourism. But along that trip, when I got out to la, I stopped at Forest Ackerman’s house. He did famous monsters of Filmland, and he used to have a thing where you could call his house. I think his phone number is three two three Moon Fan. Now he’s passed away, so that’s not true anymore. But used to, you could call and ask if you could have a tour of his house. So I went to go tour the Acker mansion, which was just a tremendous thing for me. It was as a fan of monsters and horror. But when I got to his house, it was right after Halloween and there in front of his house before I went in and saw the armature that was using the original King Kong and all these amazing props and everything else out front, he still had his Halloween Jack-O-lantern pumpkin, and it had completely disintegrated.(35:43):And it reminded me it sort of collapsed like the weird masks in Halloween three. It was so cool. But I always tell my kids, pumpkins seem safe, but you got to be careful. You could get gored.Karen Stollznow (36:02):Oh dear.Blake Smith (36:03):Oh, I’m sorry. So I had to throw that out there. But as we’re winding down here, your book is primarily focused on European vampires, but here you are working in Macau, and I don’t know if those are there or not, but I know in China they have the sort of hopping vampires and all over Asia, theyKaren Stollznow (36:22):HaveBlake Smith (36:23):Vampire adjacentKaren Stollznow (36:24):Creatures, Indonesia.Blake Smith (36:25):Yeah. And it’s like, so what do you make of these vampire adjacent monsters? Are they really vampires or is that just Europe sort of lumping everything into a category that they’re more comfortable with?Nick Groom (36:37):Yeah, well, that’s a very interesting point. I’m actually involved in a debate about that at the moment. So if we’re going to call them vampires, if we’re going to say that vampires are not every sort of blood sucker, they emerged from Eastern Europe in 1725 when en enlightenment scientists encounter East European superstitions, then that theory of the vampire develops over the course of the next sort of 150 years until we get to Dracula. And then Dracula does crystallize this European vampire with aspects of North America as well. And it then takes off not only in literature, but primarily through Phil. So the 20th century film, Dracula adaptations are very, very popular and very influential. That then influences global blood suckers. So superstitions about blood suckers, whether it’s in Malaysia or in Ecuador across the world, then begin to take on or adapt some of the features, some of the characteristics of what began as a European vampire. And so I think we’re at a stage now where there’s so much interaction between cultures, there’s so much influence across these different traditions that yes, inevitably, whether it’s East Asian or South American or African vampires or blood suckers I should say, are being influenced by what at one point was just a European vampire. But you can’t really extricate that. And I think that they, in film, in literature, in Halloween costumes, they have as much validity as any other monster does.Karen Stollznow (38:49):Well, it’s just been delightful to talk with you, Nick, and we could really talk with you for hours and pick your brains about all the things that you know, and we’re going to have to bring you back on the show now that we’ve figured out how to work around the time zones. Sure, definitely. We have to bring you back on to talk about your other books and research, but we’ve got one final question that we want to ask you that we ask all of our guests, our signature question as we put it, and that is, what’s your favorite monster?Nick Groom (39:20):That’s my favorite monster. My instinct would be to say one of the Lovecraft monsters, but I think it would actually be the RO from the Lord of the Rings.Blake Smith (39:35):Oh, okay.Nick Groom (39:36):Partly because I’ve been thinking about Tolkien again recently. I’m watching The Rings of Power second season. But the interesting thing about the Balrog is that it’s the way that Tolkien represents it. It’s clearly only partly in our world. He represents it in an ambiguous way that just hints at the fact that it can’t really be described in words because the words don’t exist, and it’s also fluctuating. It’s changing. It’s not actually wholly within the physical world,Blake Smith (40:11):Which is a bit of crafting in itself, isn’t it?Nick Groom (40:14):Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So I don’t think talking ever read Lovecraft. He certainly read Mr. James. James does something similar in some of his stories, but that sort of sense of uncertainty and ambiguity can be terrifying, I think, because the thing changes, as you look at it, you realize that it’s totally alien.Blake Smith (40:38):It is funny though, because in m Mr. James, when he leaves it ambiguous, you get the hint that it’s probably something a little bit like a hairy insect, but when Lovecraft leaves it ambiguous, it always feels like it’s a little bit vaginal. I guess they all have their own bugaboos. Right?Karen Stollznow (41:03):That’s a great answer and one that we haven’t heard before.Blake Smith (41:07):No, that’s true. You may be the first Tolkien monster we’ve had on the show in 15 years. That’s pretty surprising.Karen Stollznow (41:16):Well, Nick, just in closing, where can people find you and your books and your work?Nick Groom (41:22):Everything I’ve published is all available through a bookstore. You can find my University of Macau webpage. I’m also an honorary professor at University of Exeter, so I’ve got a couple of email addresses. Your listeners are welcome to contact me, ask me questions, disagree with me. I’m quite busy, so I can’t promise to answer everything at length, but I think it’s really important that these podcasts are two way things.Blake Smith (41:52):Oh, thank you. That’s wonderful. Yes, exactly. Yeah,Nick Groom (41:56):I think it’s really interesting what people’s responses now. I’m very happy to take things further and discussBlake Smith (42:02):Things, and I’ve learned so much from our audience, and I bet you’ve probably had the same experience across your appearances. So much of human knowledge is distributed unevenly, and it is amazing when people in the audience know things that you had no idea, and it is so edifying, so I really appreciate that. That’s great.Nick Groom (42:21):I define smart word. That’s really lovely. Thank you.Blake Smith (42:25):We will put links to all that in the show notes. And golly, this was great. I look forward to finishing your book and looking at your other work as well. This is great. Well, I hope we get to talk again, but this was super fantastic fun talking with you.Karen Stollznow (42:40):Oh, really enjoyable. Yeah,Blake Smith (42:43):Lovely to speak to you. I’ve really enjoyed it. Thank you very much for your time, monster Talk. You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about Monsters. I’m Blake Smith.Karen Stollznow (42:54):And I’m Karen Stollznow.Blake Smith (42:55):You just heard an interview with Professor Nick Groom discussing the history of vampires. We hope you like talking blood suckers because we’ll be taking several stabs at the topic for October with grave seriousness. Be sure to check the show notes for links to Professor Groom’s work and a bunch of links to the various stories and concepts that were discussed in this conversation. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Monster Talk. Our goal here is to bring you the best in monster related content with a focus on scientific skepticism and critical thinking. If you enjoy our show and want to support our mission, start out by visiting monster talk.org/support. That’s monster talk.org/support. There you’ll find links to our Patreon page as well as a donate button. If you’d like to just make a one-time contribution, a great way to support the show is to buy books from our Amazon wishlist.(43:52):These are books that directly help with our monster research. We love used books very much so. Don’t feel compelled to buy new ones. And we’re also very fond of Kindle edition because of their easily searched content and without spending any money at all, you can support and raise the profile of the show by leaving a positive review at iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Positive reviews help keep us visible in iTunes, which is a great way to help us find new listeners. Finally, remember to share episodes you really like with your friends and family. You can help make Monster talk the nightlight that keeps monsters away from someone you love. Monster talk’s. Theme music is by peach stealing monkeys. Join us next week as we continue our discussion of vampires by talking about the creepy blood suckers that scared us when we were children.Announcer (45:28):This has been a monster house presentation. |

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Right-Click, Save-AsKaren and her husband Matt are back from visiting Australia and in this episode we discuss some viral ghost photos. The photos will be in the show notes, and we will cross-post a version of this on our YouTube page with image inserts.

Karen’s new book BITCH is on sale now.

Blake’s recent article about mind viruses seems to be backed up by an even more recent article confirming that clinical evidence doesn’t support a “mind virus” explanation for idea spread.

This episode brought to you by Factor Meals – use our link or code MonsterTalk50 to 50% off your first order!

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Now on to our photos that we talk about in this episode:

Giant “humanoid” over mall in Zambia. (Or over photoshop in Internet)

Party scene with crying girl also hides “ghost face”

2007 – Parma Gas Station “ghost” or “angel”

Ghostly “shadow person” walks through traffic
(original video is gone but version here)

“Cowboy ghost” at abandoned mine

A bird landing can look like a hat in the distance – but we don’t know the scale here.

It could be a lot of things.

This (pretty obvious) long exposure shot shows up on a lot of ghost photo sites.

Irish Flax Workers and the mysterious “extra hand”

Detail shows “ghost hand” but you can also see manipulation has been done to the plate, erasing some of the pleats in the dress behind the woman with the hand on her shoulder.

Transcript:

Announcer (00:07):

Monster House presents. It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.

Announcer (00:18):

A giant hairy creature, part inness a 24 mile long bottomless lake in the Highlands of Scotland. It’s a creature known as the Lochness Monster.

Blake Smith (00:51):

Monster talk. Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters. I’m Blake Smith.

Announcer (00:59):

And I’m Karen Stollznow.

Blake Smith (01:00):

I really enjoy analyzing Old Ghost photos and so do Karen and her husband, Matt Baxter. Today, they’re back from their trip down under. We’re going to be talking about some modern viral ghost photos. Now. This is lighter fair than our past few episodes and a much appreciated step into the orange and red crunchy leaves of the spooky season. Check the show notes for the photos that we’re going to be discussing, but we will also be cross-posting a version of this on YouTube, which you’ll be able to watch or find at youtube.com/monster talk. All one word,

Karen Stollznow (01:30):

Monster talk.

Blake Smith (01:32):

Congratulations on getting your book bitch out the door. I know that was a complete bitch to work on. It was.

Karen Stollznow (01:41):

Yeah. I’m not sure how much listeners are familiar with the story, but Cambridge University Press, I don’t know. When I released my first book with them back in 2020, we had a global pandemic. So this time around they had to beat that somehow. So they had a cybersecurity attack, which basically shut down Cambridge University press for months. And they couldn’t receive email, they couldn’t issue royalties to people. They couldn’t publish books. So the book was delayed and Amazon was showing one date and they were telling me another date. But I’ve received my author copies now, and as you know, the Cambridge University Press bookstore featured bitch in the window of their bookstore, which is cool because it’s actually the oldest bookstore in the uk.

Blake Smith (02:30):

Wow.

Karen Stollznow (02:30):

So I’m pretty, to use a British word, chuffed about it.

Blake Smith (02:33):

Oh, sure. And I imagine a British publishing company not being able to do royalties is very off brand.

Karen Stollznow (02:41):

Yeah, probably not. But anyway, here today we have Matt joining us again. Matt talk. Its the

Blake Smith (02:49):

Show. Welcome, welcome back.

Matt Baxter (02:50):

Thank you. Thank you, thank

Blake Smith (02:51):

You. Good to be here. Welcome back to you both. My God, you guys were gone for a long time down under, so it’s great to have you back up topside.

Karen Stollznow (02:59):

Yeah, it’s great to be back. Although from our last, we had three flights over the course of about 30 hours, and I still have a little bit of hearing loss in my right ear, so I’m going to try and get into see an ENT. So even now as I’m talking to, everything’s like I’m talking into a tin can.

Matt Baxter (03:17):

It is good to be back in Denver, Colorado. But right after we got back, we embarked on another huge journey to Laramie, Wyoming.

Karen Stollznow (03:26):

Oh, it was a much bigger trip. Yeah.

Matt Baxter (03:28):

Huge, huge trip. As people are telling me that there’s been no trip like this ever taken before. And it’s

Karen Stollznow (03:37):

The best trip.

Matt Baxter (03:38):

Best trip ever is very classy

Karen Stollznow (03:40):

Than any other trip.

Matt Baxter (03:43):

But yeah, it was very interesting trip. And we got to see the Lincoln Memorial. Is it on tour again? But the Wyoming version? The Wyoming version. And it is still cool. It’s still very cool, but it’s not quite the massiveness of the normal Lincoln memorial we think about. But we had a great time there. And of course, we’re always looking for interesting things and kind of ghost stories and things like that at places we go and laramie’s full of them. But we happened upon a man who creates eyeglasses using antique frames like hundreds of years old frames.

Blake Smith (04:28):

Whoa. He makes haunted eyeglasses.

Matt Baxter (04:30):

Haunted eyeglasses.

Karen Stollznow (04:31):

Yes, they

Matt Baxter (04:32):

Would be. So it gives you a completely new perspective on hauntings. It really does,

Karen Stollznow (04:37):

Quite literally. Which has nothing to do whatsoever with our topic for today.

Blake Smith (04:44):

Well, I mean, you do need eyes to see ghost photos, so there is that

Matt Baxter (04:48):

Sometimes glasses,

(04:48)

but sometimes that mightn’t help though.

Blake Smith (04:51):

Yeah, maybe spectacles deceased. Ah, there you go.

Karen Stollznow (04:55):

Yeah. But the reason we’re wanting to talk today about viral ghost photos, that’s our topic. I guess all the time, these images are coming up, so we’re not talking about the classics like the brown lady or

Blake Smith (05:09):

The Gray Lady or the

Karen Stollznow (05:10):

Squadron or the White Lady, the tulip staircase. So these ghost photos are so famous that they have names like that and their backstories and everything. So yeah, we’re not going to talk about those because we have previously talked about them. We thought we’d talk about, well, Matt specifically is going to talk about some viral ghost photographs that are doing the round at the moment on TikTok and YouTube and the news as well. It’s just surprising to see a lot of these stories get onto the news. They’re that unskeptical about these pictures.

Blake Smith (05:40):

Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of that unskeptical reporting going around these days. I just was talking about it in the intro to last week’s episode. Some of the political texts going around is pretty clearly an urban legend, and it’s an urban legend that’s been around since the eighties. It really is really, really, really disappointing to me that the media doesn’t just call it for what it is. Look, this is an urban legend look, here’s an example from 19 85, 86, 83, instead of

Karen Stollznow (06:08):

Acting like don’t do their research.

Blake Smith (06:09):

No, they don’t. And it’s really disappointing. But quickly before we get into this, I just want to say, this is kind of weirdly on topic for my article that just came out in the British Skeptic Magazine where I’m talking about

Karen Stollznow (06:20):

Congratulations on that.

Blake Smith (06:21):

Thank you very much. 10 years of work in a one page doc. I don’t know. Still it’s hard work to get all those ideas distilled, but the main thing is we’re talking about virality in terms of it exponential growth online, not in the terms of mind virus. And I was really surprised they ran another article this week, which is an academic response to the idea that mind viruses even exist and they don’t. And there’s some beautiful evidence to support that. That’s not how that works. So I was really excited and it was kind of coincidental, but my timely, very timely. So I appreciate Michael Marshall putting that out. So I’ll put that in the show notes as a link. But we’re talking about virality in the sense of going exponentially spreading on the internet. So Matt, what you got for us?

Matt Baxter (07:10):

Well, I wanted to say in terms of that urban legend you were talking about, we’re hoping sometime this week Karen will have an article about that coming out on Cambridge Cambridge’s University Press. Yes,

Karen Stollznow (07:25):

Their blog. That’s right, yes. Their blog. It always takes some time to go through the production process. So yeah, hopefully next week. But I will share that around on social media and hope it goes viral like these photographs.

Matt Baxter (07:39):

Well, here’s the funniest thing about a lot of these photos is, other than some stuff that comes up on TikTok, there really aren’t as many viral ghost photos as there used to be, and I find that to be really interesting. Now, there’s two main categories for these photos, and one is fraud. They’re just out and out people trying to fool other people kind of photos. And then there’s what we would call paraia or a misunderstanding because our eyes see things sometimes that aren’t there. So we have a lot of misunderstandings when we look at photos often, and we think we see what’s not a ghost.

Karen Stollznow (08:29):

Well, we want to aid this episode too, because obviously this is a visual conversation talking about this topic. It’s visual. So we want to include these pictures in the show notes so that listeners can look at these as we’re discussing them if they’re not commuting or something.

Matt Baxter (08:45):

Right, right. So if you’re commuting, when you get home, look at the show notes.

Blake Smith (08:49):

There you go.

Matt Baxter (08:50):

And it’ll make so much more sense. So right off the bat, I want to talk about this one photo that appears to be like a large human being or an angel or a

Karen Stollznow (09:08):

Alien.

Matt Baxter (09:09):

Yeah, an alien or something floating over what appears to be a strip mall

Karen Stollznow (09:15):

As they do.

Matt Baxter (09:17):

Yes. Which death, it’s very

Blake Smith (09:20):

Ominous death. If I saw this, I would also pull over and take a photo. Yeah, for

Matt Baxter (09:24):

Sure. Yes, yes, yes. The only problem with this particular photo is when we look at it, we don’t get multiple pictures of this. We get one picture. Now, if you did see this, like you said, Blake, you would pull over and take a picture of it. There are a lot of cars driving in this picture and a lot of cars parked. So a lot of people should have seen this, and we should have a lot of pictures of this from different angles.

Karen Stollznow (09:50):

Good point.

Matt Baxter (09:50):

We have one photo. So this particular picture you look at and you can kind of tell that there’s some Photoshop going on in this or a photo

Karen Stollznow (10:03):

Editing can. For someone like me, I really can’t. I mean, I don’t immediately look at it and think this is a ghost. I look for natural explanations, but on the surface of things, I can’t spot it.

Matt Baxter (10:16):

Okay. Well, and that’s fine. That’s fine. Because what you can do is try to see if there’s anything that resembles out there already. This human-like form.

Karen Stollznow (10:28):

And

Matt Baxter (10:29):

There is because there’s a kite. I’ve

Karen Stollznow (10:36):

Seen the sicken photograph

Matt Baxter (10:37):

In the show notes. If you go down a little bit, you can see the kite and that’s it. The kite was photoshopped into it. There’s right underneath that I have a link. So if you want to go purchase this kite, you can as extra proof that it’s the kite that’s real and not photoshopped and not the picture of the strange human floating over the mall. I want you to know that the picture of the kite that I have there is not fake news that is actually real. That’s a real kite. You can go and buy it.

(11:09)

So… Pretty Cool.

Blake Smith (11:11):

(11:11)

So again, check the show notes for the images, but for our listeners who can’t do that, right now we’re talking about a vaguely humanoid shape with wispy feet. The feet ended like points and the hands are very, I don’t know, suggestive of hands without really being hands. And in this photo, the ghost photo or image photo or whatever this is, it’s all grayed out. So it’s like a gray, dark shape hovering above the shop, which would make it, I don’t know what, several hundred feet in length. If it were real, it’d be really, really big or close to you, or really super close, which that would also be creepy. But parts of it look like it’s floating in the clouds in an angelic, demonic way or something,

Karen Stollznow (11:59):

But it has the same arms and legs.

Blake Smith (12:01):

Oh, it’s a really close match to the cloud or to the kite. To the kite,

Karen Stollznow (12:05):

Yeah.

Matt Baxter (12:07):

And there’s lots of different variations of this kite that you can get. This particular one is called a spirit,

Karen Stollznow (12:16):

This

Matt Baxter (12:16):

Particular kite.

Karen Stollznow (12:17):

Very telling.

Matt Baxter (12:18):

Yeah. Gives it away.

Karen Stollznow (12:21):

Well, we’ve got lots of pictures, so we should probably move on to the next one.

Matt Baxter (12:24):

Yes, yes. This next one here is, it’s kind of a popular one wine. It’s of six ladies. They look to be anywhere from teenage to early twenties. And there is a young girl in the photo, probably three years old, I’m guessing that is, they’re all posing for the picture. But the little girl is crying her eyes out, and supposedly the reason she’s crying is because an unseen hand pushed her in the back. And then you can see between the legs of two of the girls, a very disturbing face looking out.

Karen Stollznow (13:09):

I see it

Blake Smith (13:11):

Among my favorite kind of photo, the face or the hand or the body. That shouldn’t be able to be where it’s shown. I love that.

Matt Baxter (13:21):

Exactly. Exactly. Now the thing is, here’s the problem with photos like this. It could be a multitude of things. You can’t say one solution to go solved. We solved it because there are many different solutions. Now, when you have a photo that has many different solutions, it suddenly makes the ghost solution that much less likely. It’s unlikely to begin with, but it’s that much less likely as soon as you have several solutions. Now, when I was a little kid, about three years old, I was sort of in this position of this little girl in the sense that I always wanted to be around my older siblings, and I was often mysteriously pushed in the back to get out of their way in which I would

Karen Stollznow (14:15):

Cry by ghost.

Matt Baxter (14:16):

I would cry my eyes out. So they didn’t want her in this photo, is what I’m guessing. And they pushed her and she’s crying. So I think it has nothing to do with an unseen hand other than the fact that the little girl probably wasn’t looking when the hand pushed her. But the thing is, is I’m able to, if I look hard enough to see eyes looking from practically between all of these silhouettes of legs, if I want to look

Karen Stollznow (14:45):

Hard enough distressing in their jeans.

Matt Baxter (14:47):

So the thing that bothers me is this face that is between these legs is kind of too good

Karen Stollznow (14:55):

Compared to the other marks.

Matt Baxter (14:57):

Either there’s another young sibling that was in the picture and playing around, or this was put in there, but it’s hard to say which, or it’s a ghost or a ghost, or it could be potentially a case of paraia where we are looking and we’re seeing a face because we are naturally wired to do so. When we’re born, the first thing we see is kind of our mother’s face, and we bond with that. When we look at clouds, we see faces. When we see any kind of just random

Announcer (15:35):

Pattern,

Matt Baxter (15:36):

Jesus on a, we see Jesus, we see Mary, we see Bernadette Peters on toast. We see all kinds of things. The bottom line is, the bottom line is that we don’t know. We’ve got one picture there. Were probably more than one picture taken. There was probably more one picture taken in this little setting here, but we only see this one. So we don’t see what’s before missing, what’s after it. So we have a real deficit of information. So all we can say is there’s a lot of solutions to this. It’s probably not a ghost.

Blake Smith (16:12):

I would add that there are people who are super inclined to see patterns. If you see patterns everywhere, they call that epithelia. And I don’t think it’s a binary. I think Abini is sort of a spectrum, and some people are more inclined to make connections than others. But on the far end of that spectrum is sort of the syncro mysticism world where literally everything is connected and it feels like madness. But a lot of people find comfort in finding all these connections. And this is everything from ghost photos to the Bible code, just seeing patterns everywhere,

Karen Stollznow (16:52):

Trying to make sense of our environments. Well,

Matt Baxter (16:54):

I often get comfort from madness. I thought they were a pretty good group. I like our house

Karen Stollznow (16:59):

In the middle of our

Matt Baxter (17:00):

Street beyond. I get a lot of comfort from madness often. But one of the interesting things here

Blake Smith (17:06):

Is welcome to the House of Fun, by the way. Yes, absolutely. Now you’ve come of age.

Matt Baxter (17:11):

Absolutely. But Athenia applies as well to sound, and we need to think about, we’re just here looking about at pictures, but when we talk about EVPs and things like that, people hear things that maybe aren’t necessarily what they think they’re hearing.

Karen Stollznow (17:32):

And that just makes me think of as soon as our son was born, suddenly I’m hearing a child crying or talking, God, every time I get into the shower,

Blake Smith (17:41):

My Yes.

Karen Stollznow (17:41):

And then on the other side of things, you’ve got someone like Frank Sump, the

Blake Smith (17:46):

Frank Franks,

Karen Stollznow (17:48):

Oh, Frank’s Frame fame. What was he, I think had a tap running one day and thought he could hear his son’s voice through the water, or could hear his wife calling him through water. So it’s interesting how different people will hear different things.

Blake Smith (18:03):

Well, yeah. And you get Richard, Richard prone to Richard Shaver using his welding machine and hearing voices from beneath the Earth. I mean, yeah. Yeah.

Karen Stollznow (18:11):

Although

Blake Smith (18:12):

We’ve talked before about when you see too many patterns, I call it crap athenia, where you’re making connections that are pretty obvious to most people are not really there, but I like that. Yeah, yeah,

Matt Baxter (18:23):

Yeah. Well, it happens a lot with blow dryers, Blake, when you’re drying your hair with blow

Blake Smith (18:28):

Dryer. Exactly. Frequent thing I do, for sure.

Matt Baxter (18:34):

My phone ring, you hear the phone ringing and you turn off the dryer, the phone ringing stops, you turn it back on, the phone rings again, but it’s not Not there. It’s not happening. Or you hear a police siren.

Karen Stollznow (18:46):

Well, moving on. We’ve got lots of pictures still.

Matt Baxter (18:47):

Yeah, yeah. So this next one is called the Blue Angel at the gas station.

Blake Smith (18:55):

Oh my God, this takes me back. Yeah. A lot of us are going to remember this.

Karen Stollznow (19:00):

Early two thousands,

Blake Smith (19:02):

I’m guessing 2008. This is just a guess.

Matt Baxter (19:05):

Yep. Right around then.

Blake Smith (19:06):

It predates Monster talk. But one of my first YouTube videos was a response to this. Yeah. Yeah.

Karen Stollznow (19:14):

Oh, yes. Yeah. Oh, this is going back a little.

Blake Smith (19:17):

Yeah, quite. It feels a little silly to look at it now. But anyway. Yeah. I

Matt Baxter (19:21):

Love this. And I’m curious, Blake, on some of the details of what you think about this, because I only partially agree with, say, captain Disillusion on this one, because he’s saying it’s blue because of the reflection off a blue wall.

Blake Smith (19:40):

I never really looked at the color issue. I just basically recreated, I basically did a video where I showed how that if the camera is focused on the distant, and you put something in the foreground really close, it becomes super blurry. It’s blur. Yeah.

Matt Baxter (19:55):

Yes. And yeah, I actually made a recreation of this as well, but in terms of the color, it’s a blue angel because the color on the camera itself is sort of calibrated more to the blue. And the reason you can see that is the reporter that did the story on this stands in front of the camera at one point, and her outfit is purple when she walks in the store and the regular news cameras are on her outfit is red.

Karen Stollznow (20:24):

Ah, that’s interesting.

Matt Baxter (20:25):

Pretty

Blake Smith (20:25):

Clear indicator of a color shift. Yeah. Yeah,

Matt Baxter (20:28):

Exactly. So yeah, I disagree that there’s reflection off a blue wall. It’s the camera problem itself, but this is absolutely a bug on the lens or on the glass or the casing of the camera. And it happens all time on these security cameras. We see it so much. I remember. And the bottom line is, you’re absolutely right that something close to the camera, when the camera is focused for a distance, something close to the camera will always be blurry. It’s not ghostly, it’s blurry.

Karen Stollznow (21:04):

Well, this is reminding me, Matt, of another video that you’ve recreated of a gym that had a

Matt Baxter (21:11):

Spider,

Karen Stollznow (21:12):

And that was a bug. And Blake has done that with the train. Was it the train video?

Matt Baxter (21:18):

Lots of, yeah, the phantom train with the spider web. Yeah. Yeah. We all remember that one. Go back through our YouTube channel if you want to see that.

Karen Stollznow (21:26):

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Matt Baxter (21:28):

But that was factor faked that that was on. And I was doing an investigation at a local restaurant called Yak Yeti, and on one of our cameras

Karen Stollznow (21:39):

That is eating dinner,

Matt Baxter (21:41):

I caught a spider swinging across the lens, and it looked like a ghost walking across in front of the camera. But it was definitely a spider swinging on a web. And the reason I know that is because the camera picked up mic on the camera picked up it screaming as it went by. So that’s all

Blake Smith (22:06):

I would say. Next time in Colorado, we need to go do some further investigation over Curry, for sure.

Matt Baxter (22:13):

Yes, absolutely. But this next one is, I thought initially looking at this picture that it was another case of something on the camera lens,

Karen Stollznow (22:26):

But it’s a shadow person that

Matt Baxter (22:27):

Just happened to look like a shadow person walking out into the street. But I was wrong. I was absolutely wrong. It is, if you watch the YouTube video that will be in the show notes, you will see a shadow person literally walking out into the street in

Announcer (22:44):

Front of cars and buses in

Matt Baxter (22:45):

Front of cars and being completely unaffected, bypass passing by cars. And that makes me feel, not know, but feel that this is a complete hoax.

Blake Smith (22:57):

Yeah, it looks like a hoax to me. I’m watching the same thing.

Matt Baxter (23:00):

Yeah. Because it doesn’t move like a human or anything like that. But the bottom line is if a camera could pick up a ghost, there are more dead people on this earth than there are live people. That’s true. And they would be picking up this everywhere. The streets would be covered with ghosts, with all these cameras everywhere, but they’re

Karen Stollznow (23:23):

Not, why this one?

Matt Baxter (23:24):

Why this one? To me, it says broad hoax, but I could be wrong. So now this next one, we have a picture of someone standing in front of a mine, a mine shaft, and in the background, it seems to be a cowboy in a long trench coat, maybe from the spaghetti Westerns C cleaned

Blake Smith (23:54):

Eastwood, for sure. Yeah. Got a duster and a cowboy hat. Yep.

Matt Baxter (23:57):

Yeah, yeah. And you totally see it because you’re primed to see it. That’s what you see.

Blake Smith (24:02):

Although we don’t know how tall that bush is. That’s exactly, is this cowboy six feet tall or six inches tall? I can’t tell

Matt Baxter (24:09):

Exactly, exactly. You’d really have a good frame of reference for it. But the bottom line is we’ve been primed to see a cowboy. We’ve been told there was a cowboy overlooking on the hill. So we completely ignored the fact that there’s a lot of rocks everywhere around here. That could be a rock sitting there. But how do I explain the cowboy hat? Well, I’ll get to that in a moment. But one thing about these mineshafts is there’s always a lot of junk around any mineshaft. There’s a lot of junk around. If you scroll down, you can see it at a mineshaft that’s not that far away. You see a old metal barrel with a sign that says, thieves will be prosecuted.

Karen Stollznow (24:54):

Very threatening sign

Matt Baxter (24:55):

The barrel has lots of bullet holes through it and everything

(24:59)

It comes to show that there are things that if sitting up on a hill, if there’s things leaning up against it or whatever, you may not be able to recognize exactly what it is, because you don’t have the depth perception. You can’t tell. Now, as for the cowboy hat, if you kind of zoom in on that cowboy hat, it also kind of looks a little bit like a bird landing. Well, gee, how lucky would you have to get, get a shot of a bird landing? Well, I looked up bird landing on Google, and there’s a ton of pictures of birds landing because birds land multiple times a day, and there’s a lot of birds out there. And a bird landing looks a little bit like a cowboy hat.

Karen Stollznow (25:42):

It does.

Matt Baxter (25:42):

If you had a

Karen Stollznow (25:43):

Bird, it’s still plausible than a ghost.

Matt Baxter (25:44):

Yeah. I’m not saying that’s what it is, but it is more plausible than a ghost. So a bird landing on a rock, a stump, a piece of junk or whatever, could look a little bit like this.

Karen Stollznow (25:59):

Well, as you were saying before, with the other photograph, we don’t have anything that precedes this or follows this. So perhaps in a following picture or a preceding picture, it’s not there.

Blake Smith (26:09):

That is always annoying. In fact, Richard Wiseman years ago, ran a ghost hunting website where basically people posted ghost photos and people tried to explain them, and oh my God, I had so much fun on that site. There was so many. And one of the main

Karen Stollznow (26:28):

Great idea,

Blake Smith (26:29):

One of the main tactics was to try to find other photos of the same site from different angles. And some really easy explanations came from just realizing that, oh, that’s a rock. Oh, that’s a painting inside the building. That sort of thing that you couldn’t tell from the alleged ghost photo, but you could easily tell from a different perspective at a different time. So yeah, I’d love to see some different photos of this site. That would be one of the first things I’d want to find.

Matt Baxter (26:57):

And I dug and I couldn’t find anything, but I know both you and I have done that. We’ve solved things by doing just that. Then people don’t think about it. They only look at the one picture.

Blake Smith (27:08):

They

Matt Baxter (27:08):

Don’t think about, well, would a different picture show what that is better?

Blake Smith (27:14):

Exactly.

Matt Baxter (27:15):

Or it’s those kind of

Karen Stollznow (27:16):

Things. You’ve talked about the Brook Forest in before. Do you want to try to quickly tell us that anecdote about the photograph and the group that came through that you were educating?

Matt Baxter (27:30):

Oh, sure. Sure. So there was a ghost hunting group that wanted to go into the Brook Forest Inn, which is in the mountain town of Evergreen here in Colorado. And it’s got lots of ghost stories associated with it. The owner said, you cannot come in unless you take a ghost hunting course. We don’t care how experienced you are. You have to take a ghost hunting course from Matthew Baxter. So I thought, that’s really cool that they said that. So it’s like, okay, set it up and explained how to do things. And they ignored everything we said. So they went through just snapping shots of everything

Karen Stollznow (28:12):

In the dark.

Matt Baxter (28:13):

In the dark. And they sent us one photo, and it was one photo only, and I can send this photo to you so you’ll have it for the show notes, but it looked like a very mysterious lion was there in the hotel, and it was really kind of scary looking or some kind of weird distorted dog or something. But there was this vicious looking animal that was in the dark coming out at you, kind of, and they couldn’t explain it. And we’re like, well, send us pictures from before and after of this picture. Yeah,

Blake Smith (28:56):

Threw obvious. So we threw all those away because they didn’t have a lion in them, you see? Exactly. So they threw away all the other

Matt Baxter (29:04):

Pictures,

Karen Stollznow (29:04):

Or maybe they did then that’s the problem.

Matt Baxter (29:09):

So it’s like I’m really face palming myself at this point. So I went through the inn and looked for what it could have been. And you know what I found? Found a picture hanging on the wall of a statue of a lion.

Karen Stollznow (29:31):

They took a picture of a picture,

Matt Baxter (29:33):

They took a picture in the dark, and then were shocked to find that this was actually a picture hanging on the wall of a lion.

Karen Stollznow (29:40):

Did they You though? That’s what I wonder.

Matt Baxter (29:43):

What did they, oh, I made it so they couldn’t deny it, and they felt really smart after I showed it to ’em. But it’s just people get so excited about finding a ghost and how special that would be that they find it that more important than paying attention to the facts.

Karen Stollznow (30:08):

Sure. Yeah.

Blake Smith (30:09):

Well, I mean, think about how many times, I mean, we’re talking about ghosts, but another category of this kind of photo is religious photos of Virgin Mary or saints appearing in

Announcer (30:21):

Photos, Mary and apparitions.

Blake Smith (30:23):

Boy. Oh my gosh. People want that to be true, and they’re very motivated for that to be true. And when you post even a pretty obvious fake, you’ll find a lot of people who find it a wonderful confirmation of their preexisting belief. And it’s like you can’t remove bias from the explanations. It is part of the story. Did you ever see,

Matt Baxter (30:46):

I took a picture of a pancake years ago, and it had Osama bin Laden in it, and I can send you that picture. It’s so convincing,

Announcer (30:56):

Terrorist,

Matt Baxter (30:57):

And if you look, you can see like a skull elsewhere. But Osama, Osama bin Laden is the most important thing in the picture. And I’m positive that that’s real.

Blake Smith (31:08):

This waffle was an inside job. That’s what I’ve,

Karen Stollznow (31:12):

But yeah, there are lots of pictures that I think we’ve spoken about before when we did the show for YouTube on Marion Apparitions. Do you guys remember we talked about the Sydney Mary, Virgin Mary? Yeah. She was a fence post or something, somewhere in Waverley. I can’t remember exactly where it was Bondi Beach around that area. But at certain times of the day, you would see her, and then the rest of the time you wouldn’t. And it was basically a fence post, but it was a fantastic angle. And you’ve got lots of those images. There was one on the Chicago, some underpass

Blake Smith (31:44):

Chicago,

Karen Stollznow (31:46):

Lots of them

Blake Smith (31:47):

On the fence about Mary. Right.

Karen Stollznow (31:51):

That would’ve been a great title. Okay. Well, moving on. We’ve still got a few more to look at. We

Matt Baxter (31:57):

Do. We do. So this next one is interesting because it’s a couple that they’re sitting. It is at night, and they’re sitting kind of up against this sort of retaining wall kind of thing.

Blake Smith (32:12):

Yeah. It looks like a really old place that they’re at. It looks like made of Old Stone,

Karen Stollznow (32:16):

The castle, or

Matt Baxter (32:18):

Yeah, there were steps going up on side, and they had someone take a picture of them. And this is obviously not the only photo from this, because she’s not ready. She’s looking at her fingernails and so is he. And they’re completely not ready. And there’s a ghost standing next to him. So they were not ready for the shot, and the ghost was ready. But

Karen Stollznow (32:43):

The ghost is always ready.

Matt Baxter (32:44):

This cannot be the only photo from this series here. But what it is, when you look at it, if you know anything about photography, this was a slow shutter speed and somebody was walking by, or somebody was also supposed to be in the picture, and

Blake Smith (33:01):

They just moved a little bit. But Matt, I don’t remember anyone else being there when the photos were developed. This is what I saw.

Matt Baxter (33:07):

Yeah.

Blake Smith (33:08):

How do you explain that? So

Matt Baxter (33:08):

Should we talk about that because Yes, I absolutely agree with that. The power of the backstory, the power of those kind of things. If you have things like that going on, that kind of backstory, it paints a picture that’s away from skepticism, and you have this assumed honesty of these people.

Announcer (33:37):

Sure.

Matt Baxter (33:37):

So they’re filling in the blanks for the more sensational possibility here. Well, I don’t want to say possibility, but story, and that people assume honesty when they’re hearing these very earnest backstories, but it’s just not good enough for them to say, oh, well, I don’t remember anyone in the picture. If that person was a little bit behind you, you might not have seen it. Or if it’s like multiple pictures were taken, it’s like, oh, wait, there’s people walking by. Whatever. You don’t tend to always remember those things.

Karen Stollznow (34:15):

Of course.

Matt Baxter (34:16):

So it can be honesty in some cases that they literally didn’t remember someone being there.

Blake Smith (34:24):

True.

Matt Baxter (34:24):

But this is obviously some sort of landmark where people are going to be walking by, so maybe they didn’t remember anybody that they knew personally. Just a strange, that doesn’t mean it’s devoid of human activity. And of course, even the quality of this picture is terrible, but you can tell that that is a slow shutter speed of someone walking by, and it’s pretty simple.

Karen Stollznow (34:53):

Makes sense.

Matt Baxter (34:53):

Our final picture here that I want to talk about is a much older picture. It is claimed to be 1900, and it is of linen workers in Belfast.

Blake Smith (35:06):

So the Collectivists got it. Okay.

Matt Baxter (35:08):

Yeah, exactly. Now, the thing is, on one of the young lady that submitted this to an Irish website said that this woman on the right was her grandmother, and she had never noticed before this mysterious hand on her shoulder.

Karen Stollznow (35:31):

Okay. Is spooky.

Matt Baxter (35:33):

That is spooky. But for those of us that know anything about Photoshop, there was a heyday of being able to pirate Photoshop between pretty much 2000 and 2010. And the kind of photo trickery that many of us would do becomes very obvious in this photo. If you look in the upper right hand corner, you can see the repetition of copy and paste trying to make it look like there’s nothing behind

Blake Smith (36:09):

This using the rubber stamp tool circa 1996.

Matt Baxter (36:15):

But if you take it a little bit farther, like I said, this really became a thing in the early two thousands. Now, what’s stunning about this, this picture was submitted to this website, 2005, so the timing works out, but so we have this picture, and in this picture there’s 10 women, but if you look a little harder, you suddenly see that it’s not the original picture. There are 15 women in this other picture.

Karen Stollznow (36:48):

Yeah. That is so strange because I, I’ve only ever seen the one, the first one that you have here with the 10 women. Yeah. Wow. That’s missing.

Matt Baxter (36:59):

Let’s go back to this one. With the 10 women, you get a little cleaner picture. Now you’ve got the woman that has the hand on her shoulder, right to her left. It looks like Kathleen. And it looks like she time traveled.

Karen Stollznow (37:18):

It does. Blake’s wife.

Blake Smith (37:22):

Yeah. You’re not wrong.

Matt Baxter (37:23):

She time traveled and she just heard, she time traveled right after she heard Blake say a pun.

Blake Smith (37:30):

I’ll have to say she even looks even more like Kathleen’s grandmother. Oh my God. She looks like

Karen Stollznow (37:35):

Kathleen’s grandmother.

Blake Smith (37:35):

Really? Wow. I mean, she’s an absolute ringer. An absolute ringer for my wife’s the

Karen Stollznow (37:42):

Latian.

Blake Smith (37:43):

Yeah, it’s the Lian face. She’s got that whole, yeah.

Matt Baxter (37:46):

So if you could do me a favor, Blake, and see if Kathleen has any old pictures of her grandmother as a linen worker.

Blake Smith (37:53):

Yes. Because then

Matt Baxter (37:56):

If we could get a better picture of this, that would be great. Okay. But here’s another problem with this picture with the 15 girls. Okay. So you still have the mysterious hand on the shoulder, but the girl on the top row, on the far right looks wrong in the picture skirt.

Announcer (38:14):

The skirt tall.

Matt Baxter (38:15):

The skirt is different from everyone, and it looks like it can be photoshopped a bit. There’s some things kind of missing there.

Karen Stollznow (38:22):

She’s standing aside from everyone. The rest of the are all kind of huddled together, and she’s off the side. And even

Matt Baxter (38:28):

Her face and everything, it doesn’t look right. And even the background behind her is different from everyone else.

Blake Smith (38:34):

Oh, yeah, I see what’s going on here. Yeah, exactly.

Matt Baxter (38:37):

There could be some chemical problems in the developing that can have that happen,

Blake Smith (38:41):

But it is worth, I think this is super important, especially for things like this. And for Goddard Squadron photo, it’s important to remember that the modern software of Photoshop is named that because of the techniques that they’re making digitally that recreate the things that people used to do mechanically in the photo studio. And that included literally painting or drawing or taking pieces from one the negative and pasting them into another negative,

Karen Stollznow (39:13):

And

Blake Smith (39:13):

Then reshooting. So I mean, yeah, I could see where this could be the literal result of old timey Photoshop in the analog sense.

Matt Baxter (39:23):

Yes. Yes. Because here’s another thing that I think is kind of strange, and that is if we’re talking about a linen factory, I don’t think these are the only women that worked there. And the aspect ratio kind of looks wrong to me, a little too square. And on shots like this, they tended to be a little more landscape. So I feel like we are missing more. And the fact that this only came out in 2005, I find to be superior, suspicious.

Blake Smith (40:00):

Yeah. Well, it’s also worth remembering that in this age, they would often take multiple photos and then use scissors and other tools to put together the best version.

Matt Baxter (40:11):

That’s where cut and paste came from.

Blake Smith (40:13):

Literally, cut and paste came from. Exactly. And if you don’t know that, you might think, well, this is impervious to manipulation because it predates digital photography. No, that’s not how that works at all. In fact, if we go back to looking at Mumbler work and other sort of early photographic manipulation, I mean, these techniques were within 30 years of photography being invented,

Karen Stollznow (40:38):

Widespread,

Matt Baxter (40:39):

Right? So the thing is, is I’m not saying that what we’re implying here is the solution because there’s a lot of different possibilities on this, but it kind of points to the fact that that’s not a ghost. That hand is not from a ghost.

Blake Smith (40:58):

Big picture question. So we’ve talked before, and actually I guess over the course of the show, lots of times about the question of whether or not photography or video is ever going to be useful for proving the existence of the paranormal or persistence of life after death or any of these things. And I think with the advent of these digital tools and artificial intelligence making photos out of composite information, I just wonder, have we lost completely the idea that photographs can be evidentiary?

Matt Baxter (41:41):

Yeah. I think that there’s got to be a lot of constraints around that kind of evidence. If you’ve got a very secure sort of security camera that can’t be tampered with, and you’re getting it from the original source, you see things like that. There was one, the T stealing ghost in Great Britain, when you see this tea box of tea float in this grocery store, in this drug store that was taken off security camera footage with an iPhone.

Karen Stollznow (42:21):

That was in Whitby too, I think, wasn’t it?

Matt Baxter (42:23):

Yes.

Blake Smith (42:24):

We

Karen Stollznow (42:24):

Talked a lot about Whitby.

Blake Smith (42:25):

That’s the item floated straight across from one shelf to another. Is that the one you’re talking about?

Matt Baxter (42:30):

Yes. Yeah.

Karen Stollznow (42:31):

Yeah. It was too good.

Matt Baxter (42:32):

Yeah. So the thing is, it was not an original source, and none of these things are original source. And that’s where we get photo degradation, which really adds into the paraia. And that’s like some of these pictures, they are so many generations from the original photo that it’s a bit like the telephone game. You have the original person at the end of the line whispering something into someone’s ear. By the time you get to the end of the line, it’s something completely different than what was originally said. That is the same thing with photo degradation. The more you degrade the photo, the more you’re going to see things that aren’t there. And this goes for window reflections. Oh, there’s a face in that window. Well, no, that was the face of you taking the picture. There’s all kinds of problems in this. The

Karen Stollznow (43:23):

Myrtles plantation photograph as well of Chloe.

Matt Baxter (43:26):

Yes, yes. Absolutely. Yeah. The degradation in that, because that picture was taken, what, in like 1980 something?

Karen Stollznow (43:36):

I think it was in the nineties.

Matt Baxter (43:37):

Nineties. So there’s no reason for it to be like black and white. The picture was in color

Karen Stollznow (43:43):

When it was taken rain. Exactly.

Matt Baxter (43:45):

So they really degraded it and degraded it. So you couldn’t tell that it was a laundry mangler.

Karen Stollznow (43:52):

Well, that’s our theory. Yeah.

Matt Baxter (43:53):

Well, it is our theory and being able to say, I don’t know is very important.

Karen Stollznow (43:58):

Yeah, true. But it’s the best theory I’ve ever come across. But I guess we should close off pretty soon, but I have just one final, another big picture question that our son Blade asked, because here we are. Last night we were looking at ghost photographs on YouTube and talking about people committing fraud and creating these photographs and inserting ghosts and doing all these kinds of things that you’ve been discussing. But why do people do this? I mean, it’s one thing if people think they’re seeing something in an image, and but why do people commit when it comes to photographs?

Blake Smith (44:32):

It’s fun for a lot of us. I think it’s just hilarious. It’s key questions

Karen Stollznow (44:36):

For Matt.

Blake Smith (44:36):

It’s very funny. Yeah.

Matt Baxter (44:40):

Well, and that’s absolutely, I would say the number one reason is it is a very teenage mindset to do it. It’s hilarious. It is fun. How many people can you fool? It’s like a lot of guys when they’re young will flex their bicep and show you how big their bicep is, but behind their bicep, they’re pushing it up with their other hand.

Blake Smith (45:02):

They’ll spoil the trick. I’m trying to make my kids think the workout’s really paying off. So

Matt Baxter (45:07):

Yeah, it’s hilarious to do that. It’s a joke. You’re ready for people to go, oh, wait a minute. And when they don’t, it’s hilarious.

Karen Stollznow (45:17):

But

Matt Baxter (45:17):

On top of that, it is also you’ve got pious fraud where you truly believe in something, but you can’t produce the evidence that, and you truly believe in it. You will produce evidence just to get other people to believe the way you do. And there’s a lot of reasons, and there’s just some bad psychological reasons to do it. And then there’s just having fun. Sometimes there’s no real, unless you’re making money off it. A lot of people do this more for attention than they do for money, but money does come into it as

Blake Smith (45:53):

Well. So in the end, if we’re looking for the question of whether or not ghost photos can prove the existence of ghosts, we have to answer in the negative

Karen Stollznow (46:10):

And cut.

Matt Baxter (46:15):

Cut and paste.

(46:17)

Exactly.

(46:22)

MONSTERTALK!

(46:23)

You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about Monsters. I’m Blake Smith.

Karen Stollznow (46:28):

And I’m Karen Stollznow.

Blake Smith (46:30):

You just heard a conversation with Matt Baxter and Karen Stollznow and myself about analyzing viral ghost photos. I will always have a special place in my heart for this kind of work, but as technology improves and people get better and better at faking these things digitally, I have to wonder if they will eventually lose all their power to fascinate. I hope not. But in the meantime, remember that when a photo looks too good to be true, it probably is. We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of MonsterTalk. Each episode, we strive to bring you the very best in monster related content with a focus on bringing scientific skepticism into the conversation. If you enjoy Monster Talk, we now have a variety of ways to support the show, all with convenient links@monstertalk.org slash support. That’s monstertalk.org/support. We have links there to our Patreon page as well as a donation button.

(47:28)

Another great way to support the show is to buy books from our Amazon monster talk wishlist, which directly helps us with our research. We love used books very much so. Don’t feel compelled to buy new ones. And we love Kindle, so we can share our digital libraries with each other. And finally, without spending any money at all, you can support us by leaving a positive review at iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Positive reviews help keep us visible in iTunes, which is a great way to help us find new listeners. And please share our show on your favorite social media platforms, monster Talks. Theme music is by peach stealing monkeys. Analyzing ghost photos always makes me “shutter to think.”

Announcer (48:57):

This has been a monster house presentation.

The post S03E52 – Viral Ghost Photos appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsPart two of our two-part talk with author Adam Gorightly about his research into the very strange history of Discordianism and The Illuminati. If you have never heard of Operation Mindf*ck, then you didn’t listen to part 1 – so get back over there!

Due to the chance that I might have failed to bleep out an “F-bomb” somewhere, I’m labeling this explicit.

LINKS:

• Adam Gorightly Books (affiliate)
• Historia Discordia (affiliate)
• Illuminati (wiki)
• INWO game (SJGAMES) and Board Game Geek review
• Can’t Get You Out Of My Head (Youtube)
• JFK Movie (affiliate link)
• The famous Playboy Illuminati Letter
• Barkun – A Culture of Conspiracy
• 60s Counter Culture
• Robert Anton Wilson
• Kerry Thornley (wiki)
• Can’t Get You Out of My Head or Documenting Operation Mindf*ck – POV Magazine
• The same “immigrants eating pets” rumor explored by folklorist in the 1980s.

This episode brought to you by Factor Meals – use our link or code MonsterTalk50 to 50% off your first order!

The post S03E51 – Operation Mindf*ck pt 2 appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsPart one of our two-part talk with author Adam Gorightly about his research into the very strange history of Discordianism and The Illuminati. If you have never heard of Operation Mindf*ck, get ready for a ride.

LINKS:

Adam Gorightly Books (affiliate)

Historia Discordia (affiliate)

Illuminati (wiki)

INWO game (SJGAMES) and Board Game Geek review

Can’t Get You Out Of My Head (Youtube)

JFK Movie (affiliate link)

The famous Playboy Illuminati Letter

Barkun – A Culture of Conspiracy

60s Counter Culture

Robert Anton Wilson

Kerry Thornley (wiki)

Can’t Get You Out of My Head or Documenting Operation Mindf*ck – POV Magazine

This episode brought to you by Factor Meals – use our link or code MonsterTalk50 to 50% off your first order!

The post S03E50 – Operation Mindf*ck pt 1 appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsIn this episode Blake continues his conversation with Richard Hatem (Mothman Prophecies, Titans, Under Siege 2) about his new podcast. Karen was away during this episode but will be back next week.

Additional Links:
Spiricom via Encyclopedia.com
Spiricom – by Kenny Biddle via Skeptical Inquirer
Recording of a Spiricom Session (YouTube)

The Mothman Prophecies (amz affiliate link)

Titans (amz affiliate link)

Miracles (amz affiliate link – to DVD)

The post S03E49 – Richard Hatem’s Paranormal Bookshelf: pt 2 (Explicit) appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsIn this episode Blake talks with Richard Hatem (Mothman Prophecies, Titans, Under Siege 2) about his new podcast.

Additional Links:

Spiricom via Encyclopedia.com
Spiricom – by Kenny Biddle via Skeptical Inquirer
Recording of a Spiricom Session (YouTube)

The post S03E48 – Richard Hatem’s Paranormal Podcast (part 1) appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsPart two of a two-part discussion with paleontologist Darren Naish about the history of Dogman lore. In part two, we discuss the current state of cryptozoology.

Be sure and check out Darren’s Dogman article below:

Darren’s Dogman Article (TetZoo)

The post S03E47 – Darren Naish pt 2: The State of Cryptozoology appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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We’re in the process of switching to our new platform and waiting on some administrative back-end changes. New episode should be up as soon as that clears.

Thanks for your patience!

The post We’re in the switch-over. appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsPart one of a two-part discussion with paleontologist Darren Naish about the history of Dogman lore. Next week in part two, we discuss the current state of cryptozoology.

Darren’s Dogman Article (TetZoo)

STM – Beast of Bray Road (YouTube)

Drive down Bray Road on your computer (Google Maps)

Linda Godfrey’s Obituary

Beast of Bray Road (wiki)

Dogman (wiki)

The post S03E46 – Darren Naish pt 1 : The Dogman appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsWe’re delighted to welcome back Dr. Ken Feder to talk about his new YouTube series that covers many archaeological frauds & hoaxes, and explains how archaeologists know what they know.

Catch his web series here.

Ken’s books are great – here’s an affiliate link to his author’s page.

Catch our previous episodes with Ken.

The post S03E45 – Archaeological Frauds & Hoaxes appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsWe’re excited to bring you an interview with Dr. Emily Zarka, host of PBS’s Monstrum series on the humanities web channel Storied.

The post S03E44 – Monstrum Talk with Dr. Emily Zarka appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsWerewolves are an ancient idea, but the meaning and beliefs around the concept have changed over time. How were they viewed in the classical world and even earlier? Find out in this week’s episode as we interview Dr. Tanika Koosmen.

Dr. Koosmen’s thesis at Newcastle online archive

The werewolf story in Satyricon

Some movies mentioned:

Van Helsing (2004)

Deep Rising (1998)

Interesting terms:

Versipellis – In Roman mythology and literature, a “versipellis” is literally a “skin changer” and referred to someone who could change their skin or shape, similar to a shapeshifter. The term is derived from “versus” (changed) and “pellis” (skin).

Episode art by Team Smith (my kids worked together on this one)

The post S03E43 – Ancient Werewolves appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsWe welcome back Dr. Justin Mullis to tell us about the interesting connection he found between Cryptozoology and the Godzilla franchise. He just appeared at G-Fest in Chicago where he spoke on this topic.

Justin’s profile at Academia.Edu

Justin visiting with Cian at The Lost World Podcast talking Kong Skull Island

Justin writes for AIPT in NYC

The Impossible Archive podcast

Justin discussing “little people” with Cian Gill

Thanks to Stephen & William Smith for this week’s episode art.

The post S03E42 – From Cryptids to Kaiju with Dr. Justin Mullis appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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right-click, save-asWe’re joined by mosquito and disease expert Dr. Louisa Messenger of the Las Vegas PARAVEC lab. It turns out that gators and snakes aren’t the big danger in a swamp. And this monster isn’t constrained to swamps. In fact, it’s probably in your own backyard.

Mosquito problem in Las Vegas

How to fight Mosquitos

Dr. Messenger’s Lab website

Additional Reading:

History of antimalarial drugs

Modern use of Quinine

The Color Mauve

History of Malaria

Lyle Blackburn’s Sinister Swamps (affiliate link)

Theodore Sturgeon’s IT!

Our guest for this episode is Dr. Louisa Messenger:

An example of a mosquito from the genus Culex:

The PARAVEC Lab Group at UNLV:

The post S03E41 – The Real Swamp Monster appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsKaren Stollznow and Matt Baxter recount their journey to solve the mystery of the ghost lights of Silver Cliff Cemetery, in Colorado.

Silver Cliff Cemetery

Prisoner’s Cinema

History Colorado

Karen’s book Haunting America (Amz affiliate link)

Announcing the release of Karen’s latest title:
bitch: The Journey of a Word

Photos of Silver Cliff cemetery courtesy Matt Baxter.

One of the newspapers cited in this research:

The post S03E40 – Silver Cliff Cemetery Ghost Lights appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsWe answer a listener question that takes us down some interesting rabbit holes and face to face with the apparently never-ending tendrils of the Satanic Panic.

Lots of show notes for this one:

South Africa’s Occult Crimes Unit: How Apartheid shaped South African attitudes toward Paganism and the Occult

Dr. Kobus Jonker

More on “Donker” Jonker

What is a Sangoma?

Wikipedia: Tokoloshe

A sample of The Daily Sun coverage of Tokoloshe

The SAPS Occult Unit was never truly disbanded?

How Apartheid shaped SA attitudes about Paganism and the Occult

Article about the 666 Gangs and the Occult Task Force

Frighteningly familiar SA Police web page about spotting Occult in kids

1999 article about failures of the Occult Task force

The post S03E39 – What the BLEEP is up with Zimbabwe Goblins? [Explicit] appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsThe US Library of Congress says the Cassowary is the world’s “Most Dangerous Bird!?” But is it? We talked with biologist Steven Portugal to find out.

Steven Portugal’s search for the Cassowary trip

Cassowary (Wiki)

Darren Naish on the 2023 Cassowary Florida Relocation Event

The post S03E38 – Scary Query: Cassowary appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsBlake and Karen discuss some recent werewolf projects, and what to do with all this research material accrued since this project started in 2011.

• Wolf-related MonsterTalk (previous episodes) Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
• Jay Smith’s historical research on hyenas and French wolf attacks. (Behind a paywall, but you may be able to get free access at your local public or university libraries. Be sure and check with a librarian.)
• Scott Lilienfeld (et al) book on Psychology Myths mentioned regarding full moon
• The Werewolf of Livonia
• Blake’s Werewolf Bibliography

The post S03E37 – Werewolf Research V appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsFriend of the show Ray Garton, author of many horror books including In a Dark Place, passed away April 21, 2024 of lung cancer.

This show is largely a rebroadcast of episode #039 from 2011.

Ray was one of the first and most prominent people who worked with Ed and Lorraine Warren who then went on to call them out for their duplicity. He wouldn’t be the only one either, as we covered in The Warren Omission a few years later.

Content Warning: Many of the alleged events that Ray wrote about for the Warrens involved sexual and physical trauma, and this episode needs the explicit tag due to discussion of that content.

Ray Garton’s Amazon Author page (affiliate link)

Ray’s Obituary

The post S03E36 – Remembering Ray Garton [Explicit] appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsWe take a look at the 1992 BBC Halloween tv special, Ghostwatch.

Ghostwatch (streaming Affiliate Link)

The post S03E35 – Ghostwatch appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsThis week we take a look at some recent news stories that fall within our bailiwick. We’ve got big cats, big-not-really-cats, and some UFO data to discuss. (with Matt Baxter.)

Note – check out the articles for images of the “Thylacine”, especially the Reddit thread and Galante’s video.

Tasmanian Tiger:

Forrest Galante’s YT Video

Coverage in Newsweek

Reddit readers have a go at the photos

Alien Big Cat in UK

BBC says DNA confirms big cat in UK

Local news coverage

2023 article with similar findings

UFO Hotspot Analysis

Axios story about the analysis

NUFORC’s website

Data Analyst considers this data

Cool – NUFORC uses an old missile silo as HQ??

About NUFORC (Wiki)

The post S03E34 British Lions and Tasmanian Tigers appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsThis week we’re going to take a quick peek behind the curtains as to how THE SCIENCE OF MONSTERS came to be published by MonsterHouse, and what you can find inside. Sales of the book directly help the show, and all of that is explained during our MonsterTalking.

The Science of Monsters – paperback & kindle

The many lives of Joe Nickell

The post S03E33 – Behind The Science of Monsters appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsBlake and Karen are joined by Matt Baxter to discuss the new horror film Late Night with the Devil(AMZ affiliate link), a fictional work that draws very heavily from “real” paranormal history to anchor its verisimilitude.

Trailer for LNwtD

Don Lane vs Randi incident

CSICOP

Randi vs James Hydrick

Randi vs Popov

Randi and Don Lane incident

Randi

Michelle Remembers

Anton LaVey

Jim Jones

Branch Davidians

The post S03E32 – Late Night with the Devil appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsIn this episode we talk with professor Jason Josephson-Storm about the concept of Disenchantment, why it’s an important and influential concept, and why it is also a pervasive myth.

The Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno

Max Weber

The Golden Bough by James Frazer

Deadly Words by by Jeanne Favret-Saada
Our coverage of the homunculus – way back in episode 53!

The post S03E31 – The Myth of Disenchantment appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsIs Bigfoot making peculiar stacks of bones in the forests of Mt. St. Helens? Archaeologist Andy White joins us to discuss the hypothesis that was the topic of a research paper by a Bigfoot proponent Mitchell Townsend.

Andy’s website (and response to Townsend’s claims)

Andy also has a YOUTUBE CHANNEL.

Taphonomy

Bigfoot proponent Townsend has been on Coast-to-Coast-AM more than once, where he also promoted his ideas about hidden images in stones.

Mitchell’s ideas are VERY reminiscent of the Richard Shaver work which we described as both apophenia and art

The post S03E30 – Bone Stacks of Mt. St. Helens appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsKaren and Blake discuss three little mysteries they’ve run across while doing research that didn’t quite warrant an individual episode, and which might benefit from some crowd-sourcing.

Examples of “Bigfoot Tree Forts”
Colorado Site discussing

Tik-Tok Bigfoot Structures

Fairy-Braids:

This is a real phenomenon – example article with photos

Loren Coleman discussing MK Davis discussing Bigfoot braids (Cryptomundo)

Some examples of algorithmic analysis of biological behaviors (gScholar)

Silver and Milk Preservation:

Example of claims in modern source: Ask A Prepper

Article about historic use of silver in baby bottles

The Oligodynamic Effect

Side-chat on Rat Kings:

An article (with some great photos) on Rat Kings

The less regal Squirrel King

Who invented Pasteurization?

The Smurfing Danger of Colloidal Silver

Emily Rosa Science-Fair Program

The post S03E29 – Three Mini Mysteries appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save AsMatt and Karen report back from their trip to Devil’s Tower, Wyoming.

reuters debunk traced to Facebook Satirical Post

Watch CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND via Amazon affiliate link

All photos here courtesy Matt Baxter.

The post S03E8 – Legend Tripping: Devil’s Tower appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsThis is the story of the search for Bigfoot as conducted by the NORTH AMERICAN WILDLIFE RESEARCH CENTER. (Which sounds a lot like the real Bigfoot research group North American Wildlife Research Team that famously setup the only permanent Bigfoot trap maintained by the national park service.) But while a lot of the stuff in this film sounds real – the whole thing is made up. The IMDB page gives you the details on the cast.

A very good widescreen version of the movie is available streaming on Amazon. (Affiliate Link)

The film follows a team of investigators who travel for months into British Columbia on horseback to find the secret valley of the Bigfoot where they will radio-tag a creature for study. Along the way they will tell Bigfoot stories and watch stock nature footage play out to a Jaws-derivative soundtrack.

If that sound sketchy, keep in mind their whole trip was planned by computer.

The computer even gave them a sketch of what they should be looking for!

The party of adventurers heads off into the wilderness.

They will encounter many shadowy creatures along the way.

They will try to out-science Bigfoot. Good luck with that.

This is a historically significant film in some ways – and has led to some interesting research which will be discussed in a near-future episode of the regular show. I’m still digging.

I hope you enjoy this review from me – and I’ve attached a contemporary review from 1978 as a PDF below.

I included a brief snippet from the Eddie Murphy Biopic Dolemite Is My Name, which tells the story of Rudy Ray Moore. I loved this movie and recommend the biopic which is streaming on Netflix. (That’s not an affiliate link – but you will need a Netflix account to watch it.)

The post S03E27 – BigFootage | Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsWe’re excited to have Professor Chris French back to introduce his brand new book, The Science of Weird Shit: Why Our Minds Conjure The Paranormal (Affiliate Link).

Links:
Wilson & Barber and the “fantasy prone personality”

Richard Wiseman appearances on MonsterTalk

Susan Blackmore (wikipedia)

Anomalistic Psychology

The post S03E26 – The Science of Weird Shit with Prof. Chris French appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsWe catch up with Richard Estep and Bil Bungay, co-authors of The Black Monk of Pontefract: The World’s Most Violent and Relentless Poltergeist to talk about the history and strange happenings alleged to take place in the village of Pontefract in Yorkshire.

Website of the house (for bookings and photos)

You can rent Bil’s movie When The Lights Went Out on Vimeo for a small fee.

And here is Bil’s Parapod movie on Apple’s platform.

Colin Wilson’s book on the topic (Poltergeist) which has the chapter that made Pontefrat famous.

The post S03E25 – The Black Monk of Pontefract appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsThis week Blake, Karen and Matt Baxter discuss celebrity UFO encounters. Why are they so popular? Why do we care?

Some examples:
John Lennon

Olivia Newton John

Elvis

Russell Crowe

Mick Jagger

David Bowie

Kesha

Demi Lovato

Jimmy Carter (see The UFO Movie They Don’t Want You To See)

Heck – YouTube is just full of these stories.

The post S03E24 – Celebrity UFO Encounters appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsBlake and Karen discuss The Secret History of Bigfoot by John O’Connor.

The Secret History of Bigfoot (affiliate link)

NYT Book Review

Trey the Explainer on Bigfoot and Indigenous Culture (YouTube)

Michael Barkun’s Culture of Conspiracy (affiliate link)

Spokane Washington Public Library reading by O’Connor (YouTube)

The post S03E23 – REVIEW: The Secret History of Bigfoot appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save AsThere are lots of things to read about this on the Internet and you will not find a definitive answer, I’m afraid. My conclusions are based on parsimony not on explicit proof. Besides, we all know how hard it is to prove a negative. It’s a complex topic with many black-box elements and those tend to lend themselves to conspiratorial thinking.

If you have things to say on the topic, come comment on the episode on our Patreon.

Some articles of interest:

Test showing negative results (Wandera)

Tests showing the phones are capable of much monitoring (Medium)

BBC Coverage of the question

ABC deep dive (10 mins) (Australian)

Gizmodo – is your phone listening?

Conspiratorial Thinking and Mobile Phones (Research Gate)

The post S03E22 – Are Our Phones Listening to Us? appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save AsA lighthearted discussion of the cryptids of Connecticut with the author and illustrator of

Connecticut Cryptids: A Field Guide to the Weird & Wonderful Creatures of the Nutmeg State, Patrick Scalisi and Valerie Ruby-Omen.

Patrick’s Amazon Author’s Page (affiliate link)

Valerie’s facebook page

The post S03E21 – Connecticut Cryptids appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Did a European-trained Werewolf haunt late 1800’s Georgia?  Blake and Karen discuss the case of the Georgia Werewolf. Sheep Ranching in Georgia Red Wolf range today (and historically) Grave of the GA Werewolf (Don’t legend trip here – it’s private land) Ghostly re-telling of the Emily Burt story Same story – from Week in Weird Georgia Ghosts by Nancy Roberts(affiliate […]

The post 309 – S2E48 – The Case of the Georgia Werewolf appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save As Episode 308 – S2E47

Blake and Karen interview Georgia paleo-artist Rick Spears and discuss his iconic sculpture depicting the local “estuary monster” that inspired the piece.  Currently located in the Darien, GA Welcome Center, the statue is a beautiful reminder of the colorful local folklore that we will be discussing in our interview. 

Rick Spears’ website 

Darien Welcome Center (home of the statue)

2012 Creative Loafing article that cites Blake and Rick

The post Altie History Part 1: An Interview with Rick Spears appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Catching up on what we’ve been working on, what’s up next, where you can see Blake talk at DragonCon this next weekend, and other big news relative to Monster House, LLC.October Forsyth County Library – 10/15/2023  DragonCon 2023

The post 307 – S02E46 – MonsterTalking 8/27/2023 appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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This week we’re seeking the truth about the strange but pervasive idea that people can use sticks or rods to mysteriously locate things.  Water is often the target, but certainly isn’t the only one.  It might be considered aqueous yet innocuous when the quest is just for a new well, but what if the seeker is being paid to find […]

The post 306 – S2E45 – The Truth About Dowsing appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Chris Woodyard returns to tell us all about the strange and mysterious phenomenon of The Women in Black that erupted in the United States at the end of the 1800s. Patrons can read a selection of contemporary news stories about this outbreak, which I’ve attached below.  LINKS FOR THIS EPISODE: Ghost & Witch Panics Victorian Mourning Clothes Whitby Goth Weekend […]

The post 305 – S2E44 – The Women in Black appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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For the next two episodes we’ll be in conversation with Chris Woodyard, an author and researcher whose work will likely be of interest to many of our listeners. This week we’re discussing omens and it turns omens can be almost anything we find symbolic or evocative – and they’re not all bad. Have a listen! Links for this episode (Omens): […]

The post 304 – Omens appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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We welcome back Dr. Brian Sharpless to discuss his exciting new book (due in October) called Monsters on the Couch.  The book looks at some of our most common monster types and discusses the real psychological conditions that can appear quite similar to these creatures. In this episode we’ll be talking about the sensitive topic of necrophilia – and because […]

The post 303 – Necrophilia appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Part two of our look at time travel stories involving old computers covers the strange and twisted tale of John Titor – aka TimeTravel_0 – a self-described time warrior from the 2030s who has come back to the early 2000s to get an old computer and save the world. Hilarity ensues. Part 2 links:The Hoax Hunter reveals his candidate. Reddit […]

The post 302 – Ghost in the Machine: pt 2 appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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In 1984 a group of people living in Dodleston, England, began to receive strange messages on a BBC Micro personal computer.  Then things got weird… Part 1 of our 2-part coverage of time-travel and vintage computers! Links: Pathological Punning – Witzelsucht   A detailed review of The Vertical Plane Where is Dodleston? The book (reprinted recently)The Vertical Plane  by Ken […]

The post 301 – Ghost in the Machine: Part 1 appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Richard Sugg joins us again to discuss the weird story of Bobbie the Wonder Dog (aka Silverton Bobbie) – a dog that took a trip of more than 2500 miles to return to its family.  The centenary of this event is almost on us – and this is our 300th episode of the show.  Lots to think about in this […]

The post 300 – Animals that Return appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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A discussion with artist and author Florian Schafer on his newest book about German house spirits. Links for this episode: Hausgeister: Household Spirits of German Folklore – pre-Order now (affiliate link) Fiction that inspired D&D: APPENDIX N (affiliate link)

The post 299 – Hausgeister! appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Richard Estep is a paramedic by day, paranormal investigator by night. Author of Grifters, Frauds, and Crooks: True Stories of American Corruption, he’s written more than 30 books on topics as diverse as serial killers, demons, UFOs, and haunted hospitals. Richard Estep (Amazon Author’s Page) Haunted Hospitals (Amazon Streaming) Haunted Case FIles (Amazon Streaming)

The post 298 – Richard Estep appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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We’re delighted to talk today with Professor Jack Longino of the University of Utah as he discusses ants! Can you help Karen & Matt out of a tough financial situation? There’s a fundraiser here and they really appreciate any assist you can provide! https://bit.ly/helpkarenandmatt DISCUSSED IN THIS INTERVIEW: “Fringes of Reason” book link (Ted Schultz) Walter Tschinkel -molten metal ant […]

The post 297 – Ants appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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NOTE: I made a dumb mistake assembling the intro to the episode and the music level got reset to 100% instead of 10%. I’ve replaced the source but the bad file is cached all over the place and it may take time for it to reach you. If you find the intro music levels are too high, you can skip […]

The post 296 – Mick West vs the UFOs: Part 2 appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Mick West joins us to talk about trying to solve UFO mysteries while keeping his cool.  Mick is the author of Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic and Respect.  He hosts a leading site for analysis of weird aerial phenomenon called Metabunk.  He also maintains the site “Contrail Science” which tries to resolve the […]

The post 295 – Mick West vs The UFOs: Part 1 appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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A look at the “incorruptible” corpses of Catholic saints and a discussion of how they got this way – with Elizabeth Harper. Wilhelmina Lancaster (new incorrupt corpse) Joyce Caroll Cruz book on incorruptible saints (affiliate link) The Mummy Congress by Heather Pringle (affiliate link) Essay mentioned The Violent Madonnasby Elizabeth Harper The Order of the Good Death 

The post 294 – Incorruptibles appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsA look at the 2012 film The Possession which is allegedly based on the “true story” surrounding a wine cabinet and a creature from Jewish folklore known as a Dybbuk. 

The 2021 Input Magazine article that “blows the lid off” the story of the Dybbuk Box. 

Affiliate Link to THE POSSESSION (2012).

The post 293 – DOATS: The Possession (2012) appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsKaren and Blake talk with Professor James Giordano from the departments of Neurology and Biochemistry at Georgetown University Medical Center about the phenomenon called Deja Vu.

The post 292 – Deja Vu appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-Asaka The Philadelphia Experiment pt 3

We take a deep dive into the absolute whackadoodle world of “The Montauk Project” and delve into its connections to the Netflix streaming series Stranger Things. (Karen & I are joined by Matt Baxter)

The first book in the Montauk series is The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time. (affiliate link)

Brief interview with Preston Nichols – 3 mins long

There used to be a very thorough debunking site dedicated to Bielek – but the domain lapsed and now it’s a lottery promotion site in non-English. The site is still available via the internet archive wayback machine!

Peter Moon is the co-author of the Montauk Project books as well as the Transylvania Series about mysteries discovered beneath the Romanian Sphinx. He is also the proprietor of the online Time Travel Education Center.

Previous coverage of the Philadelphia Experiment

The Duffer Brothers’ MasterClass on TV Series Development

Stranger Things (Netflix)

The Saucer Life (Podcast)

The post 291 – Montauk & Stranger Things (Explicit) appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save AsAuthor Sarah Krasnostein joins us to discuss her book The Believer: Encounters with the Beginning, the End, and our Place in the Middle.

The Believer on Amazon (affiliate link)

Previous episode discussing Australia, UFOs, and young-earth Creationism

Previous episode discussing the Ark Encounter park.

The post 290 – The Believer with Sarah Krasnostein appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save AsContinuing our look at the many ghostly legends surrounding the Louisiana plantation-turned-bed-and-breakfast, The Myrtles. Karen & Matt just got back from another visit/investigation so check the show notes for some fresh photos!

The Myrtles

Whiskey Rebellion

Ghostland by Colin Dickey

Haunting America by Karen Stollznow

Oleander

Yellow Fever

“Singleton” earrings allegedly stolen by Chloe.Creepy painting of “half dead, half alive” faced girlMirror at Myrtles with damaged silvering. Allegedly caused by ghosts, but reliably caused by mundane reasons for old mirrors. Allegedly this piano sometimes plays ghostly notes when nobody is around it.Could this old clothes wringer be the shape some claim to be “Chloe” in a famous photo?The post 289 – The Myrtles: Part 2 – Send the Made-Up appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-click, Save-AsA look at the many ghostly legends surrounding the Louisiana plantation-turned-bed-and-breakfast, The Myrtles.

The Myrtles

Whiskey Rebellion

Ghostland by Colin Dickey

Haunting America by Karen Stollznow

Oleander

Yellow Fever

The post 288 – The Myrtles: Part 1 (Dread & Breakfast) appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsMatt Baxter joins Blake & Karen to discuss the case of the allegedly “demon haunted” house of Gary, Indiana. There will be a companion video to this focusing on Zak Bagans’ film of the same location in the very near future.

You can see a lot of the characters in this story in this Inside Edition clip.

Joe Nickell’s investigation into this case.

Please take a moment and fill out our Airwave survey – just go to the survey page and select MonsterTalk from the show list, then answer the questions. Thanks!

This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/monstertalk and get on your way to being your best self.

The post 287 – The Demon House of Gary, Indiana appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsWe chat with podcaster and writer Toby Ball about season 3 of his show Strange Arrivals, which just began dropping new episodes.

Discussed in this episode:

Strange Arrivals podcast

David M. Jacobs, Alien Abduction Researcher

Zimbabwe UFO case (Ariel School)

Skeptical Inquirer article Abductology Implodes

Emma Woods back story

The post 286 – Strange Arrivals S3 with Toby Ball appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsFrom our YouTube collection, we bring you a podcast version of our coverage of the 1983 horror/thriller The Entity. CONTENT WARNING: Discusses sexual assault and trauma.

Watch the film here (affiliate link)

The novel of the story (affiliate link)

Watch more of our deBased on a True Story series.

Photo discussed in the episode:

A photo from the “entity” casebook. Copyright belongs to original photographer – shared here for critical analysis in episode audio.The post 285 – The Entity (DOATs) appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsWe’ve recently been looking at ghostly hitchhiker legends and in this episode Karen brings us a creepy tale from her childhood that is both a strange twist on the original formulation of the legend, and also one that comes to us from big and small-screen icon from the 60s to the 90s – the bald, Greek, lollipop sucking phenomenon Telly Savalas. Stand by as we take a wild ride with Mr. Savalas into the MonsterTalk Zone.

Show Notes:
The Extraordinary is available on YouTube for free (currently)

Weird JFK PostScript
If you want to see some of Mr. Savalas’ work, a lot of it is available streaming:
https://amzn.to/4002ukj (Affiliate Link)

Please take a moment and fill out our Airwave survey – just go to the survey page and select MonsterTalk from the show list, then answer the questions. Thanks!

This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/monstertalk and get on your way to being your best self.

The post 284 – Mr. Savalas’ Wild Ride appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsWe’re joined by Karl Mamer (The Conspiracy Skeptic Podcast) to talk about one of the weirder alt-histories out there in the monster-adjacent world of conspiracies.

Useful Links for Show Notes

• Tartaria Mudflood – video overview
• Karl’s Conspiracy Podcast
• The Skeptics Book of Lists – Karl’s book
• Bloomberg Deep Dive into Tartarian Mud Flood

The post 283 – Mud Flood and the Tartarian Empire appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsAl Ridenour (author & podcaster) joins us to discuss his research into Hellmouths and hell gates.

Al’s Book –Krampus and the Old Dark Christmas

Al’s podcast – Bone & Sickle

Parco Dei Mostri – 16th century Italian folly

11 mouth-shaped portals from around the world

“Gates to Hell” (Wikipedia)

“Hellmouth” (Wikipedia)

Fulci’s “Gates of Hell” trilogy (The Horror Podcast – also by Blake Smith)

• City of the Living Dead (Streaming) aka The Gates of Hell
• The Beyond (Streaming) aka The 7 Doors of Death
• The House by the Cemetery (Streaming)

New Orleans Seven Gates of Guineee

More gates to Hell via Ripley’s (believe it or not!)

Poison gas kills animals at Yellowstone

Lake Nyos CO2 burp kills 1700+ people and 3500 animals.

The Aeneid by Virgil

Blake’s research into the Stull, Kansas “gate to Hell.”

Please take a moment and fill out our Airwave survey – just go to the survey page and select MonsterTalk from the show list, then answer the questions. Thanks!

This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/monstertalk and get on your way to being your best self.

The post 282 – Hellmouths and Hell Gates appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save AsWe’re excited to be the premier venue for Joe Nickell’s latest research on the case of the Dover Demon.

The Dover Demon (Wikipedia)

W. Halden Blackman’s The Field Guide to North American Monsters

Joe Nickell’s Amazon Author Page

Mysterious America by Loren Coleman

NPR Coverage of Snowy Owl in California

Please take a moment and fill out our Airwave survey – just go to the survey page and select MonsterTalk from the show list, then answer the questions. Thanks!

The post 281 – The Dover Demon : Solved? appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsThis story includes the topic of suicide. If you or anyone you love is struggling with thoughts of self-harm please contact your country’s suicide prevention network. In the USA this can be reached by dialing 988.

— — —

We are delighted to be joined again by David Halperin to discuss part-2 of the convoluted but fascinating history of The Philadelphia Experiment.

You can read a deep dive into this by Halperin here: The Revealer

Mentioned in the episode:

David’s most recent book – Intimate Alien : The Hidden Story of the UFO

William Moore (and Charles Berlitz) : The Philadelphia Experiment

The movie is loosely based on the story.

David Halperin’s website & blog

They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers – by Gray Barker

The Case for the UFO by Morris K. Jessup

Jacques Vallee on the anatomy of a hoax (PDF)

Harvey (1950) – AMZ affiliate link

Mary Chase – author of Harvey

Mary Chase (wikipedia)

This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/monstertalk and get on your way to being your best self.

The post 280 – The Philadelphia Experiment: Part 2 appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsThis story includes the topic of suicide. If you or anyone you love is struggling with thoughts of self-harm please contact your country’s suicide prevention network. In the USA this can be reached by dialing 988.

— — —

We are delighted to be joined again by David Halperin to discuss the convoluted but fascinating history of The Philadelphia Experiment.

You can read a fascinating deep dive into this by Halperin here: The Revealer

Mentioned in the episode:

David’s most recent book – Intimate Alien

William Moore (and Charles Berlitz) : The Philadelphia Experiment

The movie loosely based on the story.

David Halperin’s website & blog

They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers – by Gray Barker

The Case for the UFO by Morris K. Jessup

This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/monstertalk and get on your way to being your best self.

The post 279 – The Philadelphia Experiment : Part 1 appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save AsWe’re excited to chat with Cian Gill, host of Wide Atlantic Weird, about the spooky story of The Walsingham Ghost. It’s a tale that scared both Cian and Karen as kids – and they were introduced to it through yet another spooky volume from Usborne publishing!

Haunted Houses: Ghosts & Spectres – by Usborne

True Ghost Stories by Hereward Carrington (or find it here for free)

San Francisco Examiner – Nov 29, 1891

Brooklyn Eagle – Dec 05, 1891

The post 278 – The Walsingham Ghost appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save AsPart 2 of a 2-part interview with Dr. Jeff Kripal of Rice University’s Religious Studies dept. He’s the author of several books that cover topics overlapping MonsterTalk’s bailiwick including:

The Superhumanities

The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge

Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion

The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained (co-authored with Whitley Streiber)

and

Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal

This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/monstertalk and get on your way to being your best self.

The post 277 – Jeff Kripal & The Superhumanities Pt 2 appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsPart 1 of a 2-part interview with Dr. Jeff Kripal of Rice University’s Religious Studies dept. He’s the author of several books that cover topics overlapping MonsterTalk’s bailiwick including:

The Superhumanities

The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge

Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion

The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained (co-authored with Whitley Streiber)

and

Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal

This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/monstertalk and get on your way to being your best self.

The post 276 – Jeff Kripal & The Superhumanities pt 1 appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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The Mapinguari is not the Terror Story

Right-Click, Save-AsPat Spain joins us to talk about his new book series. Host of NatGeo’s Beast Hunter series, Pat has collected gripping tales of travel, terror, and science into a 6-books series that just hit bookstores.

Pat Spain’s BEAST HUNTER on Amazon (affiliate link)

Pat Spain’s new BOOK SERIES (affiliate link)

First person to survive Rabies (that we know about)

Update on survivor story (video)

1955 Rabies Training/Education (disturbing)

Louis Pasteur and Rabies

The post 275 – Beast Hunter Pat Spain appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save AsAn interview with Dr. Stephen Hupp, lead editor on the new volume Investigating Pop Psychology: Pseudoscience, Fringe Science, and Controversies  co-edited with Dr. Richard Wiseman and featuring contributions from many well known authors including our own Dr. Karen Stollznow. 

Welcome to 2023 folks! 

The post 274 – Investigating Pop Psychology appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save-AsApologies for my voice – but despite a nasty cold (NOT COVID!) I’ve done my best to bring you a spooky Christmas Ghost Story – this time from the mind of Charles Dickens!

You can read the tale yourself online for free.

According to the Dickens Museum, this story was likely influenced by an actual train tragedy. You can read a bit about that on Wikipedia in the article about this story.

From my family and Karen’s, we wish you a very happy holiday and a very happy new year!

Check out episode #267 for more info on Charles Dickens and his supernatural tales.

Blake Smith
Dec 23, 2022
Kennesaw, GA

The post A Christmas Ghost Story #10 – The Signal-Man appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save AsWe’re joined by ichthyologist Dr. Nathan K. Lujan to discuss the legendary vampire catfish of the Amazon, the candiru! Explicit Tag on this one for frank talk about vampire fish entering penises.

Catfish attacks Dr. Lujan’s hand for blood meal (not Candiru)

Candiru: Life and Legend of the Bloodsucking Catfishes by Stephen Spotte (affiliate link)

Candiru episode clip from River Monsters

Stephen Fry duped by Candiru legend/joke

The infamous Venture Bros. Candiru Speech

This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/monstertalk and get on your way to being your best self.

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Right-Click, Save-AsWe continue our discussion of the platypus with Dr. Gilad Bino. In part 2 we explore the features that make them unique. Their extremely sensitive bills, laying eggs, venomous spurs – they’re weird… yet they don’t represent “new” so much as a surviving example of extremely old. Long ago mammals weren’t the placental creatures that we evolved from. The echidna and platypus are the last two known survivors of our very, very ancient mammal ancestry – the monotremes.

Discussed in this episode:

Venery Terms for Animals

Audubon article skeptical of these terms

Platypus Spurs

Phineas and Ferb

Mind Flayers

Dr. Bino’s Research

The post 272 – The Peculiar Platypus – Part 2 appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Right-Click, Save AsThe platypus is a fascinating creature from the family called monotremes. There is a lot left to be discovered about these animals and in part 1 we hear about the challenges in studying them. Part 2 will explore the features that make them unique. Our guest is Dr. Gilad Bino.

George Kearsley Shaw: science meets the platypus

What are monotremes?

The amazing penis of the echidna!

Lots of cool photos of platypus biological features

Maps of complex platypus nesting burrows

The Platy-Project (citizen science initiative)

The post 271 – The Peculiar Platypus – pt 1 appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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We’re joined by MonsterTalk family member Matt Baxter (Karen’s husband and host of Ask a Paranormal Investigator) to talk about his investigation of an allegedly haunted hotel in Deadwood, South Dakota. Deadwood Series (Amazon Affiliate) Calamity Jane  Wild Bill Hickcock Seth Bullock The Bullock Hotel NERF Ballistic Balls (discontinued)

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Karen and Blake discuss "the most haunted city in America," Savannah, Georgia.

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You may know Charles Dickens used ghosts in A Christmas Carol – but did you know his work also included many other weird and quasi-paranormal elements? We discuss this lesser known aspect of the famous English author with Dr. Liz Savage. Seven Ghost Stories by Dickens that aren’t A Christmas Carol. Spontaneous Human Combustion (Wikipedia) A fiery death: Murder or […]

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We continue our look at the Australian legend of Fisher’s Ghost, and how the community has responded to the story over the next two centuries. Official legend of Fisher’s Ghost – from Campbelltown Government Site, Australia Indigenous Trackers (Australia) (Wikipedia) Ghost Riots (British Newspaper Archive) The Greenbrier Ghost (wiki) The Red Barn Murder (wiki) Indigenous Trackers in Australia Additional: Karen’s […]

The post 266 – Fisher’s Ghost (Part 2) appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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We continue our look at the Australian legend of Fisher’s Ghost, and how the community has responded to the story over the next two centuries. Official legend of Fisher’s Ghost – from Campbelltown Government Site, Australia Indigenous Trackers (Australia) (Wikipedia) Ghost Riots (British Newspaper Archive) The Greenbrier Ghost (wiki) The Red Barn Murder (wiki) Indigenous Trackers in Australia Additional: Karen’s […]

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I had the opportunity to talk with game designer Mike Mulvihill about his cryptid-focused version of the cooperative board-game HORRIFIED.

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I had the opportunity to talk with game designer Mike Mulvihill about his cryptid-focused version of the cooperative board-game HORRIFIED.

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Karen takes us down under to discover the tale of FISHER'S GHOST.

The post 265 – Fisher’s Ghost (Part 1) appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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We continue our discussion of Tarot with some (hopefully interesting) digressions into Kabbalah and more.

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MonsterTalk begins its second season and its weekly release schedule with a look at the surprisingly mundane origin of the Tarot deck and how the practice of divination emerged in the late 1700s steeped in pseudo-antiquity.

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Darren Naish joins us to talk about his latest project illustrating the cryptids of Bernard Heuvelmans.

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Darren Naish joins us to talk about his latest project illustrating the cryptids of Bernard Heuvelmans.

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We’re joined by folklorist and anthropologist Dr. John Gutowski, a professor at Saint Xavier, to discuss the Beast of Busco and the festivals such creatures often inspire. Paper on giant turtle of Charbusco. Author of The Beast of Busco (currently out of print) Additional:The White River Monster – episode #204 (Joe Nickell) Our coverage of Mothman (several episodes) Arkansas policy […]

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We’re joined by folklorist and anthropologist Dr. John Gutowski, a professor at Saint Xavier, to discuss the Beast of Busco and the festivals such creatures often inspire. Paper on giant turtle of Charbusco. Author of The Beast of Busco (currently out of print) Additional:The White River Monster – episode #204 (Joe Nickell) Our coverage of Mothman (several episodes) Arkansas policy […]

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We know Columbus didn't "discover" America, yet there are so many competing narratives that seek to topple Columbus yet still not acknowledge the clear and obvious indigenous people who were already here when all of these explorers allegedly arrived. Regal's latest book looks at a broad swath of these fringe historian theories and gives them context in the bigger picture of people's search for national identity in the the United States. 

The post 259 – The Battle Over America’s Origin Story appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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Karen and Blake are joined by Matthew Baxter to tell the true story of Sara Winchester and the sprawling mansion in San Jose. Legend says the estate was built to appease the spirits of the victims of the Winchester repeating rifle. But was it? No - but the story behind the story is fascinating.

The post 258 – The Winchester Mystery House appeared first on MonsterTalk.

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